Senior develops new app for Zynga

As the co-president of the Application Developer’s Club and the creator of 12 different apps, senior Spencer Yen used his extensive experience as a computer programmer to code a game from scratch last summer.

His eyes fixated on his Mac screen, senior Spencer Yen quickly types another line of code. It was the fifth week of his summer internship at Zynga, a social game company that has created many popular apps including Farmville and Words With Friends.

As a Zynga intern, Yen spent nine weeks meeting with game designers, discussing new ideas and coding with his co-worker in the coding language Objective-C to produce the most user-friendly game.

Last February, Yen contacted Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, in search of any open positions at Pincus’s most recent startup, Superlabs.

In 2014, Pincus stepped down as CEO of Zynga to execute the projects and ideas he had been contemplating during his term.

Originally, Yen had planned to intern at Superlabs, until Pincus decided to return to Zynga last April. With the news of Pincus’s return as CEO of Zynga, Yen transferred from Superlabs to Zynga and teamed up with another intern, a junior in college, to build a new game for the company.

“It was awesome [interning at Zynga] because the app we created is guaranteed to be a huge hit, since other Zynga games like Draw Something had over a million users,” Yen said. “To know that I wrote the code and helped build an app from scratch that will reach this many users is cool.”

Despite minor bugs within a few of the app’s features, Yen successfully coded a game that he calls “a twist on Draw Something.” The app, Draw Something for Messenger, will be released in the Apple and Android App Store next month.

“The internship was a good experience since I was able to write high quality code,” Yen said. “Plus, it was really fun with lots of perks — three free meals a day and lots of arcade games like ping pong and foosball.”

Yen’s love for computer science first began in the eighth grade, when Yen decided that he wanted to create his own app that would become popular in smartphone app stores. His hard work and persistence eventually paid off when he successfully coded his very first game, Wack, at a two-week iD tech camp he took over the summer before ninth grade.

“When I created my first app, which was a simple Whack-a-Mole game, I felt pretty excited,” Yen said. “It received [around] 2,000 downloads and it was cool to have something I made on the App Store that my friends and family could download.”

Since then, Yen has been actively coding and attending different conferences including the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference last June in San Francisco. Besides conferences, Yen also attends hackathons, where coders collaborate and build different products and apps, such as LAHacks, HackTECH and Hack the North.

“Hackathons are a great and fun place for people to meet others with similar interests and spend 36 hours with no sleep to build something amazing,” said senior Aakash Thumaty, who often attends hackathons with Yen.

Yen said that although there was no particular person who inspired him to begin his computer science career; rather, living in Silicon Valley and seeing startups, tech giants and other successful teenagers inspired him.

In the future, he plans to continue coding and building projects. He hopes that one day he will be able to successfully create at least one hit.

Yen said that the best way to become a skilled coder is to keep on building, whether it’s an iPhone or Android game or a website. To further improve his coding skills, Yen may work at Zynga again part-time next semester, but will also explore other opportunities.

“The best way to learn quickly is to start a project,” Yen said. “Don’t just watch tutorials and videos or read books, but think of an idea and just launch right into building it.”