I participated in Americorps, matching with YouthBuild Philadelphia. This is where I had the opportunity to start implementing technology to automate data input work that was redundant and error-prone.
At this point I had never programmed before. I began looking up videos on JavaScript and found Simon Allardice. The organization was using Google, so I picked up Google Apps Script. The first project I developed was an attendance pipeline: it sent out daily emails to instructors containing Google Forms with rosters, processed the form submissions, detected who was absent, and sent out an “Absences” list to the staff. Many, many bugs later, it actually worked. What used to take an hour of a staff persons’ time to collect and process information, could now be handled within minutes.