A few years ago, I worked at a foundation that decided to do an online grant competition open to everybody. We expected this to be popular. All through the preparations, I had nightmares about the servers melting. In the end, though, they didn’t.

Like the Facebook girl’s party, we were popular beyond our wildest expectations. But we had planned for the load and moved our code to the cloud.

Back in 2007 that was new stuff. I’ve been at it ever since, writing code to help groups connect — to raise money, or to get input, or to appeal to their members.

Code and strategy are my strengths. Depending on the project, I may bring in colleagues to help with copy or design.

Besides the cloud, open source software — especially Drupal, Ruby on Rails (and various APIs) — make this possible.