Ever since I can remember I’ve been making things whether it be a game, website, or some sort of robot. I loved making things for myself to enjoy and play with but at some point I thought that these things could help others too. It started in middle school with a website I made to help people learn about cyber security and over time I continued to create things that I thought could help others. I realized a machine that works and a machine that matters are not the same thing and I’m glad I noticed the difference.
My love for this started with a YouTube guide on how to make a game. What pulled me in was seeing what I created finally work. A circuit doesn’t care how hard you tried and code doesn’t care about the effort you put in. It does what you told it to do, not what you meant it to do, and the only way through is to keep looking until you find the thing you got wrong. I found that I could sit with that type of problem for hours without getting tired.
The turn came when I realized what these skills actually are. Engineering is leverage. A person can only sort donations for one afternoon, but a program written in that same afternoon keeps running long after it’s been finished. A spreadsheet that takes an hour to build can save a volunteer coordinator an hour every week for years. That ratio is not a small thing. It is the difference between helping once and building something that helps continuously, and once I saw it I couldn’t stop seeing it. But leverage only decides how much you can move something, not whether it is worth doing.
Las Vegas is a good place to notice this, because the gap here is impossible to miss once you look. The same valley that runs the Strip has neighborhoods where a quarter of residents can’t reliably afford food, and food insecurity and lack of digital access can affect many of the same communities. A family that can’t get to a pantry’s website can’t find the pantry. A parent who can’t fill out a form online can’t apply for the benefits they qualify for. A kid without a laptop does homework on a phone, or doesn’t do it. These systems work exactly as they were built to. They still don’t reach the people they were built for. None of that requires a breakthrough to fix. It requires somebody who knows how a computer works to sit down and care.
The same skills that get pointed at optimizing an ad click or shaving a millisecond off a load time can just as easily be pointed at routing a food delivery, tracking a pantry’s inventory, or getting a laptop into a kid’s hands, and the technical difficulty is often lower. It is a question of where you aim, not of what you know. Technology built without the people it serves is a solution in search of a problem, and there is no shortage of well-intentioned tools that nobody asked for and nobody uses. You can only learn what people need by asking the people who need it. This is what engineering should be for.
The good news is that the barrier is lower than most people think. You don’t need a degree or a title to be useful. Teaching a kid what a for-loop is, fixing a neighbor’s laptop, building a nonprofit form that replaces a clipboard. Even if you don’t have the skills to build something, you can still donate an old computer or phone, spend a Saturday at a repair cafe, or help wipe drives on donated machines.
If you want to find a place to put your skills to work or a place to donate in Southern Nevada, these are good places to start. Compudopt Las Vegas refurbishes donated computers, gives them to families who need them, and takes volunteers in the warehouse and in their programs. Las Vegas-Clark County Library District needs volunteers for computer lab assistance and tutoring, and runs the free Teen Coding Clubs and Tech Labs. Catchafire matches people with technical skills to nonprofits that need them, in projects sized in hours rather than months. And if you are on the other side of it and you need help, dialing 211 connects you to local resources including digital-access and device programs in most areas.
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