Year in Review: 2024-2025

Recently, I heard the saying that "most people underestimate what they can do in a year, and overestimate what they can do in a day". This got me thinking about AppDev, which is now approaching its one-year-and-one-month anniversary.

Just last June, AppDev was nothing more than an idea. By July, it had evolved into a static website and a Google Drive folder full of unfinished plans. Today, I'm proud to say that it's become an official club with over 40 members and 4 full-stack projects.

Looking back, I'm truly grateful for and amazed by how everything came together. So, I wanted to document the highlights here!

Fall Semester

We started off with a slight issue - applications for new clubs opened in October and decisions are finalized in December, so we couldn't become an official MIT club until Spring. Thankfully, students can still operate an unofficial club, which meant we could recruit members, hold meetings, and run projects, but couldn't do things like reserve rooms, post flyers, or promote at activities midway. Despite these limitations, we proceeded with operations, resorting to unreserved classrooms and solely promoting via DormSpam.

Fast forward to recruitment - Josie (my co-president) and I had low expectations for interest meeting turnout, but we ended up having over 50 attendees and just as many applications. Of those, we welcomed 23 new members for a total of 4 project teams. Some quick info about each project:

• MapIT: An interactive map of MIT's campus and events, featuring room-level resolution
• MIT Clubs: A platform for students to discover clubs and track recruitment deadlines
• Full House: A web app to help students find roommates and housing for summer internships
• Marketplace: A cross-platform app to simplify the current DormSpam process of buying/selling secondhand

Meanwhile, our finance chair secured two sponsorships for the year (shoutout Rebecca!), providing us with funding for deployment and hosting events.

We wrapped up the semester with our first-ever Demo Day, followed by a team dinner at Yamato! This was the first time the whole team had gone out together, and it was really nice getting to bond with everyone as a community.

Spring Semester

We headed into spring with a newly-approved club application, 25 additional members, and an ambitious-as-ever exec team. Project-wise, we continued development for MapIT, MIT Clubs, and Full House, with the aim to have them deployed by the end of the semester. We also began establishing a suite of internal development tools, the first being TimTasks (our own version of Jira).

Logistics-wise, we switched up our meeting format. Previously, we had groups breakout into work sessions; however, realizing many of our members wanted more foundational knowledge, we replaced those with hands-on workshops. Then, we held individual team meetings during the week that served as standup and work sessions. Despite the added efforts, this structure ended up working much better for project productivity.

Finally, as finals season approached, we held our second Demo Day, this time featuring deployed versions of our nearly production-ready apps. It was super cool to see everyone's individual contributions, especially those who came in with less experience but had picked up new skills over the course of the semester.

Summer

Before a new school year starts, transfer of knowledge is crucial. That's why the incoming co-presidents and I created a handbook to document everything in full - including but not limited to membership, meeting structure, project logistics, and finance. This will help new recruits and execs gain a better understanding of AppDev's inner workings.

On the dev side:

• Our incoming co-president, Eric, put together a fully working CI/CD pipeline; this will not only streamline our development process but also save us from having to use overpriced blackbox solutions.
• One of our board members, Jieruei, did a much-needed redesign of our club website!

The month before school starts is also the perfect time to launch and promote our apps. As you might have seen here, we just officially launched MapIT, right as frosh arrive on campus for orientation. We have more launches prepared soon, so stay tuned!

Final Thoughts

Being a new club can be difficult, but seeing it come together this past year has been incredibly rewarding. Thank you to our founding exec team and to all our members who brought AppDev to life! Lastly, good luck to our incoming exec - I'm excited to see where you take AppDev next!