Introducing Cornell AppDev
Cornell University’s Product Development Team
Tada! This marks the beginning of the Cornell AppDev blog! We are a project team that puts Cornell University at the forefront of product development. If you’re a student at Cornell, you may have heard of us through our popular on-campus app, Eatery, which helps thousands of students find their way around dining halls and cafés on campus.
As a completely student-run organization, we design, develop, and distribute apps on the App Store, Google Play Store, and the web for both Cornell and the global community. We work in a startup environment that allows students to gain practical experience in software development, design, and product management. We’re also proud to teach courses on product development and design that students at Cornell can take for university credit!
In this post, we share what we hope to achieve and provide to our community with our blog.
Missions
AppDev started as a team of less than 20 students in Fall 2014 with a sole focus on iOS app development. Since then, we’ve grown to a diverse team of 46, including iOS developers, Android developers, backend developers, product designers, product managers, and marketers. Over the years, we’ve accumulated a couple of core missions that drive everything we do.
1. Build & Deliver
Let’s face it. Creating an app and seeing people use it is exhilarating and rewarding by every measure. But it’s much more than that: for our members, building products isn’t just about getting something into the hands of users fast; it’s also about providing them with a quality user experience that will keep them coming back.
2. Teach & Inspire
We’re passionate in not only making apps but also engaging the community to learn about and participate in what we do. In Fall 2014, we introduced our iOS Training Program, the first student-organization-taught course at Cornell University with the hopes of educating maybe a few dozen students. Instead, we received a staggering 250 applications for a class of merely 60 spots. Clearly, we had found an education gap – one we’ve been gradually filling with the launch of the Digital Product Design (Spring 2016) and Principles of Backend Engineering (Fall 2017) courses. But this is just the beginning!
3. Open & Share
Now I’m sure we can all agree that free is always better. No one likes to pay for apps, especially poor and hungry college students (trust us, we understand). And that’s why we keep our apps free and our code open-sourced so anyone, anywhere, can benefit from or contribute to our products. It’s our way of giving back to the community, and we hope that this blog can be an extension of sharing what we’ve done, what we’ve learned, and what we hope to achieve.
So how will this work?
Our blog will feature general AppDev posts, as well as two specific publications: AppDev Development and AppDev Design.
General: We will announce general product launches, new initiatives, events, team updates, etc.
Development: We will post about general development concepts that our members use, our process of developing apps, and miscellaneous articles from our developers.
Design: We will feature our case studies, our process of designing apps, updates on branding, product design concepts, etc.
Of course, this is a new endeavor for us, so any suggestions are welcome! We hope that it’ll eventually evolve and expand to include more types of stories like alumni interviews or course student highlights.
TL;DR
AppDev is teaching the world about product development and design, while swiftly and iteratively shipping quality products to users at Cornell University and around the world.
If you’re hyped to hear about all of the amazing products we have been developing, then please follow us on Medium @cornellappdev and CLAP IT UP 👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻.
Interested in learning more about AppDev? Check us out on our website or on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)! Or are you a developer who wants to contribute? Check us out on Github.
Lastly, we want to thank Cornell University and the College of Engineering for their continued support. They continuously embrace innovation and push us to achieve more.
