This document discusses how the author learned to build cool things for the government by attending meetups and conferences. They created an RSS feed for their organization's news using various apps when the content management system did not have one. The author then had other people build widgets and applications for them, like one showing water savings in real-time. The author and a colleague started a local government web network to organize a conference for government web workers to discuss building cool things using public data. The author hopes to help others in government build useful applications and wants people to keep creating apps that can be used by government agencies.