Resume builder that sorts students’ interests? Check. Learning center for AP Computer Science? Check. Online golden rod system? Check.

These are just a few of the projects that senior Aditya Aggarwal has participated in as a member of the school’s Application Developers Club. Aggarwal has also contributed to projects that range from an app for community health checkups in Guatemala to the SHS app that many students carry on their phones.

He first gained exposure to programming in middle school while playing around with the appearances of web pages he made from scratch. After entering high school and joining the Application Developers Club, of which he is now co-president, Aggarwal realized how much he loved “seeing apps in action” and coming up with different ideas. For this reason, he admires the Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“[Zuckerberg] gets an idea, and he sees the implications of that idea and how many people can be affected by it. And from that he pretty much works on it,” Aggarwal said.

Aggarwal describes mobile programming as “tough and actually painful at times” because a single project can drain him for months. As he painstakingly reduces the number of errors in a program from 50 to zero, another 100 errors might appear. Still, he says the work is worth the struggle when he feels the “thrill” of seeing a project to its completion.

“You see that there’s something worthwhile at the end, something you were imagining the whole way through and now it’s better than you imagined,” he said.

Aggarwal had the chance to apply his ideas in the real world when he interned with a professor in Guatemala over the summer and created an app for children to schedule health checkups. The project was his most ambitious to date and spanned four months, though he only stayed in Guatemala for two weeks. There, he realized that he wanted to use programming to positively affect communities.

“I just believe that with programming you can help people,” Aggarwal said. “In some cases it’s much harder, but then it’s worth doing. It’s worth pushing yourself to go that far to make that impact so they can focus on the things that are important in their life.”