I got to volunteer in the classroom at Hinkley High School in the spring semesters of the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years. I assisted KidsTek instructor, Katy Limes, by helping students understand and troubleshoot their code written in Python. This was a challenge to me since I primarily write C# and JavaScript code and had never played with Python.

My favorite thing about volunteering at Hinkley was being able to actively promote diversity in the tech community. I had done a few things at work to promote diversity but it didn’t have the impact I wanted. However only 4.5% of the student body identifiers as white, so I when I walked into the classroom at Hinkley, I was the only white male in the classroom and I remember thinking “THIS is what I want more developer teams to look like!”

In June of 2023, I was recognized as Volunteer of The Year which was cool and entirely unexpected. I just really enjoyed giving the students confidence to figure out problems and write code.

This school year the KidsTek program at Hinkley High School has been put on hiatus. Hopefully, they can get things going again. But until then, I’m finding other volunteer opportunities.