Code, Sweat, & Tears
Since 8th grade I have been involved in a program called Youth In Government. Youth In Government, fondly abbreviated YIG by its members, is a civics engagement program that aims to teach students about government and to empower them as servant leaders. Starting in 9th grade, I began to take up leadership positions in this extracurricular which gave me real-world experience with solving problems in a team setting. Yet one interesting problem appeared near the end of my first year in leadership that beckoned me to find a solution. I had just been elected as secretary of the local area and given the responsibility of tracking meeting attendance of members at events. I vividly recall the outgoing secretary training me, showing me this tattered composition notebook where she haphazardly recording meeting attendance. “That won’t do”, I thought. “That can’t do”, I insisted. I had to find a solution.
It was at a leadership conference a few weeks later that I found the solution to my problem. I was sitting at a table with a friend of mine, Nihir Patel, and we were discussing our plans to track member records for the following year. I told him about pitiful …show more content…
We had zero programming experience and not the slightest idea of what we were doing. We had a vision, but absolutely no clue how to convert those raw ideas into something useful. I painfully recall asking a professional programmer about where to start, and his response was blunt but true: “Don’t bother. Pay someone to do it or give up. You will never accomplish this and are only going to let others down.” But he was wrong. Three months later we launched DelegateTracker 1.0 to the rest of our delegation, and were met with looks of amazement and wonder. We had programmed it line-by-line, and learned on the fly. Every single button, page, image, or feature on the website was the work of dozens upon dozens of hours of experimentation, curiosity, and most of all,
Since 8th grade I have been involved in a program called Youth In Government. Youth In Government, fondly abbreviated YIG by its members, is a civics engagement program that aims to teach students about government and to empower them as servant leaders. Starting in 9th grade, I began to take up leadership positions in this extracurricular which gave me real-world experience with solving problems in a team setting. Yet one interesting problem appeared near the end of my first year in leadership that beckoned me to find a solution. I had just been elected as secretary of the local area and given the responsibility of tracking meeting attendance of members at events. I vividly recall the outgoing secretary training me, showing me this tattered composition notebook where she haphazardly recording meeting attendance. “That won’t do”, I thought. “That can’t do”, I insisted. I had to find a solution.
It was at a leadership conference a few weeks later that I found the solution to my problem. I was sitting at a table with a friend of mine, Nihir Patel, and we were discussing our plans to track member records for the following year. I told him about pitiful …show more content…
We had zero programming experience and not the slightest idea of what we were doing. We had a vision, but absolutely no clue how to convert those raw ideas into something useful. I painfully recall asking a professional programmer about where to start, and his response was blunt but true: “Don’t bother. Pay someone to do it or give up. You will never accomplish this and are only going to let others down.” But he was wrong. Three months later we launched DelegateTracker 1.0 to the rest of our delegation, and were met with looks of amazement and wonder. We had programmed it line-by-line, and learned on the fly. Every single button, page, image, or feature on the website was the work of dozens upon dozens of hours of experimentation, curiosity, and most of all,