The Boulder Bash App was the first time I was paid to code and make software that would be used by other people to solve a problem! Because I was one of the Route Setters for Iowa State’s Boulder Bash climbing competition, I offered to create an application that would help us score all the climbers and get a leaderboard for the competitors. They took me up on this offer two days before the competition so I spent the next 26 hours programming a Tkinter application that would end up being the leaderboard scoring system we used for the competition.
Although the application didn’t look great and had more bugs than a summer night in Iowa, it worked exactly how it needed to on competition day! It was also helpful with data collection as all the data was saved to a CSV that we exported to Excel! This challenge, drive, and desire to help people with software was solidified with this application and has only grown since then. This application was part of my RecHelper Presentation, as it was the catalyst for its creation.