Sophomore’s non-profit organization aims to inspire younger generations to pursue programming

Courtesy of Yash Sharma

Sophomore Yash Sharma presents “Wonders of Python” on a trip to India in summer 2023.

In July 2022, sophomore Yash Sharma started People of Programming (POP) — a non-profit that runs coding workshops and competitions in order to inspire students to pursue programming.

Since its creation, the 501(c) certified organization has grown from an idea to a team of 15 regular members that now regularly hosts educational coding events. Over the past year and a half, POP has hosted two hackathons as well as multiple outreach events where Sharma and other high schoolers taught younger students about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning.

Volunteers have been central to facilitating large events like hackathons, where participants work together to design and write code that solves a problem. POP’s first hackathon, which was held during January of 2023, saw over 120 participants. In order to smoothly run the event, Sharma recruited 11 volunteers by sending out social media advertisements, reaching out to many of his contacts from previous hackathons that he had attended and recruiting help from the Sunnyvale Public Library.

“Our focus is to provide the best experience to our guests, and in that journey for providing good service you need people that are willing to be dedicated and committed to putting in the effort,” Sharma said.

During the January hackathon, Sharma organized two different “divisions” for volunteers — an advertising division and an outreach division. The advertising division was responsible for pushing out content and advertisements to make sure people were aware of the hackathon. The outreach division was in charge of reaching out to venues and sponsors for prizes. 

Between major events like hackathons, POP has also hosted two small scale outreach events at local libraries, known as “Wonders of Programming.” During one such event held on Aug. 9, 2022 at the Sunnyvale Public Library, members of POP and a small group of volunteers presented applications of AI and programming to a young audience of around 20 elementary and middle school students. 

“Wonders of Programming started as a small event between me and a couple of friends,” Sharma said. “We had a lot of participants, and we demonstrated what cool things you could do using AI and taught participants how to use Scratch (a block programming language).”

People of Programming has also hosted two “Wonders of Python” events in July 2022 and January 2023 in Bangalore, India, where Sharma presented real-world applications of Python to students from Rotary Bangalore IT Corridor at Government High School Immadihalli.

Besides the Wonders of Programming and Python events, the last large scale event POP hosted was a hackathon in June, which drew around 50 participants from across the Bay Area. This open-prompt “Summer Hackathon,” in which participants worked to build and improve upon existing software of all kinds, was the first one that Sharma organized independently without help from the Sunnyvale Public Library, and was a trial to see how well POP could function on its own. 

Although there were fewer participants than in previous competitions, Sharma expressed confidence in POP’s ability to run independently, saying that it was a great learning opportunity for his team. 

Having found its feet, POP is now working to plan future events, including a game night on Dec. 1. According to Sharma, POP Game Night was a beginner friendly event where the community could come together to enjoy a friendly kahoot competition about coding algorithms and win awards like cash prizes, Discord Nitro and more. Currently, POP is also preparing to host monthly community Q&A speaker presentations with professionals and professors working in CS, set to begin in January. 

Ultimately, Sharma’s long-term goal is for POP to deliver more high-impact events that can inspire young people all across the world to become more interested in programming.

“We want to teach people in a way that’s intuitive and easy so that they want to learn more about programming,” he said. “Our goal is to teach as many people as we can, because it can really change their lives.”