In conversation with Techno Tiger Sahil Kuchlous
Sahil Kuchlous is a grade 12 student of Inventure Academy, Bangalore. Sahil recently volunteered with Reap Benefit and put his coding skills to work on our Neighbourhood Dashboard. Youth Board Member Deepika Aiyer interviewed him to find out more about his journey in the world of #techforgood.
Starting Young
Sahil has been interested in coding since a young age, thanks to the support and encouragement of his father. He started out coding small projects and programs on his phone, and by the time he was in the 8th grade he started thinking about ways in which he could use his programming to make an impact.
Sahil reached out to the non-profit Data Kind and through them he worked on his first project with Pratham Books, a non-profit that publishes multilingual books for children. It was his first brush with #techforgood on real-world team project.
Always Learning
‘My father works in the software industry and I’ve always had his support,’ Sahil shares. ‘Programming can be a bit frustrating when you’re just starting out and it was really good to have someone close by who I could ask my questions to and who can guide me.’ Sahil says the best way to get experience programming is to do it more and more. ‘There were a lot of things that I used to do just for fun in programming that really helped me build upon my basic knowledge.’
Sahil is also a competitive programmer. In competitive programming one has to solve programming tasks in a defined period of time. ‘The idea is you compete with other people to see who can create the best solution. So that’s something I have been working on quite a bit and recently I made the Indian top 30 team. So I’d say that it’s small things like this that have really helped build the foundations for me to get involved in more complicated group projects.’
#TechForGood
When the Corona virus crisis started and the lockdown began Sahil and his father were both looking for ways and means in which they could contribute something. ‘We were always hearing news stories about how doctors, nurses and frontlines workers were helping people and we knew that our skills couldn’t help with that directly.’
A friend told them about Reap Benefit’s neighbourhood dashboard and they reached out to the team. ‘And that’s where it all began.’ Sahil recounts ‘“’Since then we have just been working together with the team and it’s amazing to see how far the project has come.’
Age no bar
Sahil says it can be intimidating going into a project knowing that you are going to be the youngest and least-experienced person on the team. ‘I was scared that people would not take me seriously because of my age, but I was really really blown away by how open it was and how welcoming the whole Reap Benefit team was. I remember the first video call we had as a team to discuss the steps moving forward and the roles that everyone would play in the development of the website and everyone welcomed me with open arms. I felt like I was an equal on the team.’
Come together
Sahil says he never imagined the scale the dashboard would reach. ‘It’s really amazing to see that once we gave it that small push, how people from the community got behind it. The website would be nothing without all the data that people are collecting and crowdsourcing and that’s what really makes the dashboard. Because if you have a dashboard with no data, then it’s as good as no dashboard. It was really cool to see how the entire community came together behind this project and really pushed it beyond what we could have ever imagined.’
Sahil’s contribution
Sahil worked alongside a team of Cisco engineers to create a stronger back end for the dashboard. “We helped to create more features such as the bounding boxes for the municipalities and faster processing of zooming in and out feature and creation of map icons. All of this was done in collaboration with Cisco CSR.”
Sahil shares that he didn’t have much expertise in these areas and was more into machine learning and artificial intelligence. “The entire project was a new experience for me, working with servers and databases.”
Problem Solving Skills Put to the Test
Sahil recalls a major bugs that was particularly frustrating. ‘ I remember how a few days before we were to launch the new version of the dashboard we were struggling with this small bug that whenever we would click the zoom in button instead of zooming in to this smaller area, it would just blow all the way up and just showed the whole world map. It was really, really frustrating because there are so many layers to the program. And it was quite hard to figure out which layer or which part of the program was causing the bug.’ Sahil remembers how the team spent days and days trying to figure out why this was happening. ‘And we had to put the whole team on it. Everyone was working on it like day and night. And then finally, one of us found a small piece of code somewhere in the bounding box code where one X character was replaced with a Y character. And because of that, the entire thing was breaking. And I remember it was just a mixture relief and frustration that it was such a small detail that someone missed. But that’s just how team projects are. And that’s why it’s important to have everyone working together on these kinds of things. Because sometimes one person will see something that the other person didn’t. And that’s a part of the fun.”
Sahil feels that the most important thing that Reap Benefit is doing is raising the voice of the youth. “A lot of people forget that the youth will be the ones who are going to be making the changes tomorrow and the sooner we introduce them to that responsibility the sooner that they will become contributing citizens.”
Sahil is now busy with his online classes and applying to college. And he’s also working with the AI development team of another company. He’s looking forward to college and finding out new ways in which he can use his skills to help more people
Sahil ended the conversation with Deepika with a shout out to the Reap Benefit team! “Thank you so much for taking me in for treating me like a mentee and teaching me. I’ve learned so much through this opportunity. The generosity and the approachability was really really amazing and it was such a great experience. I hope more students take advantage of the opportunities that you’re providing.”
If you’d like to volunteer your skills and time to Reap Benefit, fill out our volunteer application form here.
A big shout out to Sahil for volunteering with us and taking the time to talk to us about his experience. Thank you Deepika, Sanskriti and Tejas for putting this story together.
