My Time At Social Coding
Social Coding whose main mission is to encourage students to work together on open source projects to learn new technologies, learn new skills, and build up their portfolios. Social Coding was my first introduction to open source and collaborative programming and I joined it in the Fall of 2021. Over the past few years it has been a wonderful experience to meet new people and grow as a developer.
Fall 2021 - Spring 2022
When I joined in the Fall of 2021 I participated in a project called Student Roullete as a member. The goal of this project was to create a central point where student organizations at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities could publish their events and users could subscribe to them and be notified of upcoming events. This project was developed with Express, React Native, MySQL, and more where I was tasked as the frontend developer. I was able to learn a lot about React Native and how to develop mobile applications. I was also able to learn about the importance of communication and how to work with a team of developers.
Fall 2022 - Spring 2023
My second year I was elected as the Director of External Relations. Throughout my time here I bridged relations with the University and other Computer Science student organizations across campus. A new strategy for user recruitment and retention led to our doubling of membership and greater support for projects within the organization. Moreover, I also spearheaded the Workshop initiative designed to teach newer students about technologies that they can incorporate in their own projects.
Social Coding's end of the semester final presentations. We love developing things and had a great turnout!
Missing Semester of Your CS Education
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education is an adaptation of a course taught by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that teaches students about the tools that they will use in their careers as software engineers. These tools include Git & Github, the Linux command line, Bash, different IDEs, and writing test cases. I worked on creating the curriculum for the course alongside Evan Voogd. This workshop was quite successful and gained significant interest from students across campus and we intend on continuing it in the future.
SQL & Databases
The SQL & Databases workshop was designed in collaboration with Evan Voogd. It was designed to teach students the basics of using a database such as schema design, basic querying, modeling relationships, querying relationships, and designing scalable infrastructure. This workshop was considered one of the most successful in Social Coding's history and we intend on continuing it in the future.
Gopher Grades V2
One of the other projects I worked on during this time at Social Coding was Gopher Grades V2. This application was designed to improve upon the previous Gopher Grades application to provide students with grade distributions across the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. During this time I was the Data Lead for the project ensuring the quality and accuracy of the data.
Prerequisite Flowchart
The second project that I worked on during this time was designed to help students vizualize their pathway through their time at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. For this project I was tasked as the backend and vizualization lead. This project was successful in generating images but lacked a proper data source to retrieve information as the University of Minnesota did not have a schema designed for this purpose or a public API. Regardless, it was a great learning experience and I was able to learn a lot about vizualization and backend development.
This was an early release of the Prerequisite flowchart. Solid lines represent a prerequisite and dashed lines represent a corequisite.
Fall 2023 - Spring 2024
My third year I was elected as the President of Social Coding. At this role I shifted my focus from project development towards improving organizational infrastructure. With the rest of the board we reformed the structure for projects, increased the scope of the treasury, developed new workshops, and coordinated recruitment/retention strategies that led to massive growth in the organization.
Social Coding's orientation for the Fall of 2023. Thanks to everyone who came out to be a part of our community!
Fall Tech Kickoff
The Fall Tech Kickoff was a new initiative started by Social Coding to bring together students interested in Computer Science before school starts. This event was incredibly successful and strongly contributed to our elevated numbers during orientation and the remainder of the Fall Semester.
Social Coding Website
I developed the Social Coding website using Next.js and Chakra UI. This greatly increased our presence on campus and allowed us to reach out to more students. Moreover, it also allowed us to have a central point for all of our information and resources.
Corporate Relations
With our growth as an organization one of the newer initiatives we pursued were connections with companies from the Twin Cities and beyond. SPS Commerce was our first company that decided to partner with us and we hope to continue this initiative in the future.
Social Coding MVP Night
This year Social Coding's MVP night was incredibly successful, with over 100 students attending. This event was designed to showcase the projects that students had worked on at the mid-point of the semester and to celebrate their accomplishments. Many of these projects were incredibly ambitious and it was great to see the progress that students had made.
Our many teams this semester, showcased above is the Computer Vision Wheelchair team demonstrating their hand detection neural network.
Web-dev Workshop
In collaboration with Evan Voogd, Luke Nelson, and Joey McIndoo we developed a new workshop to teach students about web development. The workshop went into detail about HTML, CSS, Javascript, Express, React, and other important concepts such as accessibility. Not only was this workshop incredibly successful but many project teams used it as a resource to develop their own websites.
Alumni Panel
One of the other initiatives that were pursued this year was to increase our connections with our alumni. We hosted an alumni panel where we invited alumni from Social Coding to talk about their experiences and how they got to where they are today. It was a useful networking event and the Alumni were impressed by our growth as an organization. Hopefully more events like this will be hosted in the future.
Fall 2023 Final Presentations
This semester we had a record number of projects and a record number of students participating in Social Coding. This was a great semester and I am excited to see what the future holds for Social Coding. Our Final Project Presentation was a blast and a huge success.
Social Coding's end of the semester final presentations.