I write a lot about databases, AI agents, and data engineering on this site. This post is about something different: volunteering. Specifically, why I do it, what I’ve done, and how it connects to the work I care about in tech.
The H2H Campaign
During the COVID 19 pandemic, I volunteered with the H2H (Human to Human) campaign. The mission was straightforward but critical: educate seniors about COVID 19 vaccination. Get accurate information into the hands of people who needed it most, delivered by real humans rather than algorithms or automated phone trees.
The seniors we worked with had legitimate concerns and a lot of misinformation to sort through. Social media had been flooding them with conflicting messages. Their doctors’ offices were overwhelmed. Many didn’t have the internet literacy to research the vaccines themselves, and even those who did found it hard to separate credible sources from noise.
Our approach was simple: person to person conversation. We listened to their questions, acknowledged their concerns, and provided clear, factual information from public health authorities. We didn’t lecture. We talked. There’s a profound difference.
What struck me most was that the barrier to vaccination for many seniors wasn’t resistance. It was confusion. They wanted to protect themselves and their families. They just needed someone to sit with them, answer their specific questions, and help them navigate the logistics of actually getting an appointment.
Campus Community at Carolina University
My other major volunteering experience was with campus community initiatives at Carolina University, focused on P2P (peer to peer) engagement. The work was different in scope but similar in spirit: connecting people, reducing isolation, and building the kind of community infrastructure that makes a university more than just a collection of classrooms.
P2P engagement means meeting students where they are. Not waiting for them to show up to an event, but reaching out, starting conversations, and creating spaces where people feel comfortable participating. Some students, especially those new to campus, international students, or first generation college students, won’t naturally plug into existing social networks. P2P outreach bridges that gap.
We organized events, facilitated discussions, and simply made ourselves available. A lot of the impact was informal: a conversation in a common area that turned into a study group, an introduction between two students who ended up collaborating on a project, a check in with someone who was clearly struggling.
The Connection to Tech
People sometimes ask why a software engineer spends time on volunteering that has nothing to do with code. I think that question reveals a narrow understanding of what building technology is for.
Every system I build serves people. AgenticMail handles email for businesses. The data analytics work I’ve done optimizes operations that affect real communities. The ML pipelines I build process data that originated from human activity. If I don’t understand the people on the other end of these systems, I’m building in the dark.
Volunteering keeps me grounded. It reminds me that not everyone experiences technology the same way I do. The seniors in the H2H campaign didn’t need a better app. They needed a patient conversation. The students in P2P engagement didn’t need a new platform. They needed someone to notice them.
That perspective changes how I build software. I think more about accessibility, about edge cases that affect real people, about whether the thing I’m building actually solves a problem that matters. I’m less likely to over engineer and more likely to ask, “who is this for and what do they actually need?”
Why It Matters
There’s a tendency in tech to optimize for scale, impact measured in millions of users, billions of data points. Volunteering operates at a completely different scale. You help one person at a time. The impact is local, immediate, and often invisible in any metric.
But those individual interactions compound. A senior who gets vaccinated because someone took the time to answer their questions. A student who stays in school because someone noticed they were struggling. These outcomes don’t show up in a dashboard, but they matter enormously.
I plan to keep volunteering as long as I’m able. It makes me a better builder, a better communicator, and honestly, a better person. If you’re in tech and you haven’t tried it, I’d encourage you to start. Find a cause you care about, show up, and listen. You might be surprised at what you learn about the people your work is supposed to serve.