Meet the 2022 Fellows: Laolu Adewoye
Laolu is a Civic Innovation Corps Fellow working for the Fire Department’s GIS and Analytics Unit in Philadelphia, PA
This blog is part of a series introducing a few of the Fellows selected to be part of Coding it Forward’s 2022 summer programs, a cohort of 157 early-career technologists working across federal, state, and local government in data, design, product management, and software engineering roles.
About Laolu Adewoye
Program: Civic Innovation Corps
Host Office: Philadelphia Fire Department’s GIS and Analytics Unit
Hometown: Clinton, Maryland
Academic Institution: Bowie State University
Academic Program: Bachelor’s in Computer Technology
Graduation Year: 2023
Meet Laolu
Ahead of his first day, we got to know Laolu and learn more about his motivations for working with the Philadelphia Fire Department as a Civic Innovation Corps Fellow. Keep reading to learn about his background and interests.
Coding it Forward: Tell us about yourself
Laolu Adewoye: I am an undergraduate student of Bowie State University majoring in Computer Technology. I love extracurriculars like basketball, weightlifting, chess, and story writing. I love rainy weather (especially in the spring) and grew up in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area. I see coding as not just a program, but a tool to help me understand the world around me. I picked up the interest through learning how to use Scratch in middle school. From Scratch, I learned how to use Python the following year and then taught myself the basics of C++ out of curiosity. Nowadays, I have built up my coding skills as much as I have played video games on my laptop and aim to turn my passion into a way to fuel a career.
CIF: Why are you excited to be a Fellow?
LA: I am excited to join the family of Fellows as this will be one of my first coding internships ever. I will be in a group with similarly minded people that also have a passion for various areas of computer science and engineering. I will be joining them in using my skills in public positions where my help can directly impact the community. At my host office, I can also learn from more experienced mentors and learn what it is like when technology meets a public service. In all, I cannot wait to be a Coding it Forward Fellow, and I look forward to meeting you all!
CIF: Why are you coding it forward?
LA: I find coding helps me find solutions to problems that I find throughout the day. Even if it would be easier to do it by hand, coding allows me to automate a process in such a way that I can handle the problem with a click of a button from then on. For example, when working on creating a server cluster with Raspberry Pi, I ran into a step that asked me to send files to each node on the cluster manually. Quickly, I wondered how hard it would be to do this if I had been working with tens or hundreds of nodes. I decided to create a script from scratch that did the work for me and will continue to do the work for me no matter how many computers or files I was working with.
Programming also helps me see problems in a new light, as it forces me to break down what I want to solve to its simplest form for the programming language to understand and execute. Maybe something like cluster setup or something like programming a battle for someone’s game, the experience enables me to truly understand how a problem works from the bottom up while creating a program that makes someone’s life easier by the end. If I am able to use my skills to solve others' problems, then I would have truly coded it forward from the people that created the services I use on a daily basis.
CIF: What did you want to be when you grew up? Why?
LA: Growing up, I originally wanted to be a mechanical engineer. More simply, I wanted to be someone that fixed and repaired cars. This formed from my love of racing games, and the customization and upgrading aspects when I can fit new parts to cars to make them flashy and powerful. Seeing it made me want to learn how to do it in real life. This slowly morphed into a love for how racing games are made, which made me want to be a gaming developer. I then realized that games are built on software and programming, which eventually led me to my love for programming today.
CIF: If you could visit any place in the world, where would you go and why?
LA: If I could visit any place in the world, I would love to go to Germany. Specifically, I would love to visit Nurburg, Germany, and race a car there. While my career focus moved on to computer technology as a whole, my interests stay rooted in cars and anything around them. The racing track that piqued my interest the most was the Nürburgring Nordschleife. It starts out as a normal racetrack but then transitions into a long race-prepped toll road that spans five miles (eight kilometers). It is one of the longest tracks in the world and attracts hundreds of people a year that wish to try their luck at it. Someday, I hope to be one of those people.
Check out our website for more information on the Civic Digital Fellowship and Civic Innovation Corps and sign up for our mailing list to be the first to know when applications for our 2023 cohorts open.
