Things tend
to grow.

For a long time, math meant sitting down with a problem and refusing to let it go. Then there were younger students sitting across the table, and suddenly finding the answer was only half the job.

Teaching led naturally into our annual math invitational: weekly coaching, coach meetings, writing problems, outreach, and the many small jobs behind a tournament of roughly 19 schools. In 10th grade, I stepped into the tournament director role.

There is a funny shift when you start writing problems for other people: getting the answer is no longer the hard part.

I kept competing, too. Five straight AIME qualifications sit in the background of the same long relationship with math, along with AMC, BMT, and SMT contests.

Course planning looked simple until it wasn’t. There were catalogs, prerequisites, graduation rules, period constraints, four-year choices, and a lot of “if I take this, can I still take that?”

So I built a planner.

The project changed when other students began using it during schedule release and course-change season. One family reached out on the last day of changes. Their daughter wanted to leave AP World History, but every possible replacement seemed to collide with something else.

That was one of those small moments when a side project stopped feeling quite so small. Also, it was nice when the schedule actually did what I told it to do.

At the last recorded count, the site had been visited from 169 unique IP addresses.

Writing math tournament problems can be fun. Waiting for piles of papers to be graded, checked twice, reconciled, and turned into results is... less fun. Grading had become the bottleneck, so I started building Grade Helper.

The system grew into a pipeline: photograph or scan papers, validate the images, compress and upload them, dispatch them to graders, reconcile double grading, correct disagreements, and generate an analysis report.

That failure was useful. Images were compressed to about 300 KB. Storage moved from the Google API to AWS S3 after testing showed S3 running roughly three to four times faster in this setup, while Google remained a backup. A web-server backup was added too.

Now graders can pull work dynamically. A dashboard shows progress. Scan validation happens before dispatch, and questionable, blurred, missing, or duplicated scans wait for scanner review instead of entering the grading queue.

The interesting part was no longer “Can I build this?” It became “What happens when everyone uses it at once?”

In ninth grade, I was the only pianist in my B-period choir. Four rehearsals a week, around nine pieces each semester, and another hour or two at the piano most days made the role feel heavier than I expected.

By the next summer, I had learned something surprisingly practical: ask the teacher for the music early.

Near the end of ninth grade, I also tried singing solo. Unexpectedly, I liked it.

Sometimes growing into a role looks less like working more and more like knowing how to prepare.