Open Source, Hackathons, Volunteering, and Groups
Since freshman year of college, I have been programming. I started college as a pre-medicine student, but one reading by Atul Gawande that changed my mind about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Many other pre-medical students share the same dream to someday miraculously save someone’s life through surgery. This feat would gory, stressful, and heroic.
But is this really the right way to save people?
In Gawande’s anecdote, he highlighted the importance of incremental care as opposed to surgical care, and he compared healthcare to a bridge. Would you have a bridge collapse from lack of care before fixing it, or would you rather incrementally care for the bridge? This revelation in combination to the computer science courses I tried made me realize that I could incrementally care for people through programming and data science at a massive scale.
You can build web applications from frontend to backend to catalyze non-profits. You could build apps that track people’s health or give suggestions for an improved lifestyle. You could use data science to predict whether someone has some disease or not. And we are starting to see many discoveries in these areas.
Although, it was hard getting started.
Hackathons
Most hackathons have a theme that address deeply impactful problems and encourage developers to build creative and unique solutions. Some of these themes can include healthcare, climate change, social awareness, etc. Hackathons are a great place to get started with building something for good and for meeting like-minded people.
I first discovered the power of programming for good at my first Hackathon on energy resources. I went to the Hackathon not knowing anything and joined a group of beginners as well! We decided on building a doomsday clock for some location would be under sea level. It was a ridiculous project, but I still look back on how fun it was to build this project with absolutely no knowledge on coding. It was mostly just copying and pasting different features into the code, but, as I discover soon, it is what I still do. I walked out learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And not only did this Hackathon experience help me build a cool project for the climate and help me discover my excitement for technology, but it was also a steppingstone towards my next project.
Volunteering for Non-Profits
After that Hackathon and several hours of project building, I had enough experience to build software for some non-profits. And I spend the next four years volunteering for non-profits and learning an incredible amount from practical experience and from others in the group. Some of the non-profits that look for software application developers include the American Red Cross and UNICEF. Although I was not paid, I learned how to use Git, build scalable backend systems that leveraged cloud solutions, full-stack development, and data engineering, none of which were taught at UC Berkeley.
Organizations
If you are still a student, I would recommend that you join a student organization that builds software for others. And ideally, the software would be towards a good cause. This is my first recommendation because it is the most convenient and it is the most beginner friendly compared to the other methods that I will share.
My experience with student organizations has not been the best. I was still taking introductory courses for computer science, and many of the student organizations on campus were very selective. And the most selective organization was the one student organization that built web applications for non-profits.
There are other options if you are not a student. Code of America gives developers the opportunity to develop software for their local community. I was able to explore the Code of America groups in San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco, and there were hundreds of projects that need volunteers. And there is a need for UI/UX design, frontend/backend development, database development, project management, etc. There is a role for everyone as long as you are willing to volunteer!
Contributing to Open Source Projects
There are many open source projects that do good for the world but need contributors. And these projects can be anything from creating social good to building technology to fight climate change. It is quite easy to contribute to the project if you can use some of the basic git commands to pull, merge, and push the project. I would recommend watching a tutorial on YouTube on contributing to open source projects. Personally, I used “opensustain.tech” to find open source projects that sustain stable climate, energy supply, and vital natural resources.
Doing good and creating an impact does not have to be in person. And programming makes this possible. I highly recommend that you learn to code and check out some of the resources that I recommended. Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions!
