What I've been up to, December 2010

In January my friend asked me to make him a website where he could sell his custom t-shirts. I started making changes to Wordpress themes, and that snowballed into working on the website for the NGO I worked for in India, which helped me get an internship in San Francisco with a tech company, and I gained a ton of experience along the way. This semester I got a lot better at programming and web design.

Our school's calendar and event notification systems are pretty bad, so I decided to create Good Morning CMC, a daily email with all of the day's events, talks, sports, and news. I wasn't sure if people would be interested, so I said I would try to get 200 people to sign up by October or drop it. It turns out that a lot of students were interested: on the first day of school I was only emailing 5 of my friends, but today over 400 students are signed up, representing about a third of the student body. Over the break I'm going to expand to the other Claremonts and test out a few other ideas.

I also organized CMC's first ever entry into the ACM Intercollegiate Programming Competition, a 5-hour test with questions like, "Given 30,000 points inside a triangle, find a point that splits them into three equal groups." Our team solved three problems out of eight, good enough for 27th place out of 89 in the Southern California Region, which is a CMC school record.

Other semester highlights: learning how to rock climb, turning in my senior thesis and drinking champagne in the fountain at 12:30 in the afternoon, spending a weekend building an app based on Google Finance, only to have Google roll out the feature I was trying to build on the following Monday, and setting up tools to delay my RSS feeds and my email, so I stop compulsively checking them during the day.

I am heading to Vegas this weekend with about a hundred seniors from CMC, then taking two finals and heading home in the middle of December. Over winter break I'll be working on a few different projects and trying to get better at Photoshop.

I hope you are doing well. I'd love to hear from you, if you'd like to send me a quick email or phone call to let me know what you're up to. All the best.