Behind "One Page at a Time"

Hello, reader! While you may not have known it, this blog post is not the first time you have read my writing; I have had the pleasure of being one half of the development team for this website, One Page at a Time. I wanted to pull back the curtains and share some of the insights and experiences I’ve had building this website along with my co-developer, Savannah Haverstick.

Towards the beginning of our time together as a class, we spent a session brainstorming how we could each use our unique skills to contribute to our mission. At first, I was drawing a bit of a blank, and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to bring enough to the team of students. After all, I was surrounded by peers with backgrounds in psychology, political science, and social work. Some had already worked with the unhoused population and came prepared with a wealth of pre-existing connections and domain knowledge. In contrast, I am a computer science major, and while I had more than enough good intentions to bring to the table, I recognize that these are not a stand-in for real experience. The world is already saturated with over-engineered attempts at technical solutions to social problems, and I didn’t want to become another hapless developer charging forward with their ideas without taking advice from my better-equipped peers.

As the discussion drifted towards how we could better market our book drive, my classmates had great ideas surrounding a social media and traditional advertising presence. This led me to an idea of my own, informed by my background in programming and web development: on top of maintaining social media pages, why not create our own website? While social media profiles are great for reaching large audiences quickly and key for the college demographic, I also was interested in building a more professional presence for our class project, especially with the goal of extending our work beyond this semester. Thus, One Page at a Time was born, and I excitedly started development work along with Savannah.

Over the course of development, I have been blown away by the positive response to our website. Dr. Jerinic was kind enough to share it with the speakers featured in our class, the Dean of the Honors College, and even the President of UNLV! I was so humbled to have our website put in front of all these important eyes. More importantly than any pride on my part, however, it is my hope that One Page at a Time reaches the right people with the right connections to help further our mission. It speaks to why I wanted to become a programmer in the first place: because practically every sector is in need of some kind of development work, learning to create with code has given me the leverage to make a difference across spaces that I am passionate about.

Overall, my takeaway from being a part of this website’s creation is a larger lesson on how those in the technology industry can responsibly have an impact on social causes. STEM fields and social sciences are placed often placed in opposition to, and even hierarchy between, one another. This is evident in how ethics advisors are usually seen as afterthoughts or mandatory concessions to regulators within tech companies. In reality, as the work of programmers touches more and more corners of public life, I would argue that development has, in a sense, become a social science. The technical work of developers on platforms with such expansive social ramifications as Facebook or Uber is inseparable from the impact on society their work will go on to have. Having a robust suite of tests that ensure a product is technically functional before deployment is industry-standard; why would we not do our due diligence in the same way to understand the software’s larger consequences before putting it out into the world?

While I am in no way claiming that One Page at a Time reaches the level of Facebook, I see the development of this website as a small glimpse of hope into how technology can help to solve societal problems instead of causing them. There are a few cornerstones to how this can happen. The first is for developers to be humble and accept feedback, particularly when it comes from domain experts. Just as we would not like it if someone unfamiliar with technology told us how to implement a solution, it does not make sense to convince ourselves that our ideas for a project that reaches beyond our domain are always the best just because we’re the ones writing the code.

Next, we should create technical solutions to meet a real societal need, instead of inventing overcomplicated solutions for the sake of “progress” when a traditional method could be more effective. One Page at a Time started with a real, important need: to spread the message about our class’s work and get more books in the hands of the populations we serve! My initial instinct to build it from scratch with a frontend framework like React or Angular would have been significantly more time-consuming and ultimately would have delayed getting the message out. Luckily, I had Savannah to ground me and suggest using Wix. Making something that can be labeled with more surface-level technical buzzwords would have detracted from the actual social goal of the website, and we developers should learn to resist over-engineering if it doesn’t serve the larger purpose.

Finally, we need to start seeing the relationship between STEM and the humanities as collaborative instead of combative. One Page at a Time, and this class’s achievements as a whole, show what can be achieved when students and educators from a diverse range of fields combine their unique skills to make an impact. Rather than sowing tension by arguing over which disciplines are more important to society, we should recognize that the network of roles that keeps the world moving forward is complex, and each piece of it depends on other pieces. The tech industry is no different. When we stop heralding programming as the only harbinger of societal progress, we can both identify all the other roles that have made past technical achievements possible and envision a world where collaboration between technical disciplines and social disciplines drives better-informed progress in both spheres.

It has been a pleasure to develop One Page at a Time. I’m so proud of what our class has achieved so far- thinking about the Shade Tree Book Fair will always warm my heart! I’m excited to continue development of the website even beyond graduation, as I care about this project far too much to toss it off with my cap. As you see the updates to this website, I encourage you to have some optimism for what the future of the tech industry could look like. And, of course, if you have any of the feedback I talked so much about in this post, feel free to reach out with it!

Keep learning!