I love my job. I’m passionate about technology and I want everyone else to love it just as much as I do. Day-to-day I’m pretty successful at piquing people’s interest in technology, but sometimes a story comes along and reminds me that this industry is capable of making a profound imprint on people. That’s what happened at the 2-day Boston Windows Phone Camp & Hackathon.

To find out more about the Boston event, check out a write up here and here. We’re doing more Phone Camps in the East, find one close to you!

On the Hackathon day, I spent some time at the back table chatting with the people sitting there. They were hard at work, so we chatted briefly about Colorado and snowboarding. Later that afternoon when everyone was presenting their apps, one of the men from the table, Brian, presented his game, Spooky Game. Spooky Game is a Halloween game using XNA and royalty free graphic. It turns out, Brian had been laid off early this year and he’d never written a line of code before. That morning, his 8-year son had told him to write a Halloween game with a pumpkin canon. With the phone training from the first day and the availability of XNA experts on the second day, he was able to code a working game!

When it came to vote for the best app of the Hackathon, Spooky Game won! Brian got his choice of prizes and he picked the Xbox 360 with Kinect. I have no doubt his 8-year old was super excited that his pumpkin canon idea won App of the Day!

This is one of those great stories about helping someone become a creator of technology! And he got an Xbox out of it! I’m feeling lots of warm fuzzies…like I swallowed a kitten!