by NTS Staff
Luis Hernandez came to NTS to build one web application for a college course. Two years later, he built an entire system with eight web apps and counting.
How does a college assignment turn into a two-year commitment? To get there, you have to start well before the assignment, in a primary school classroom in California. A boy named Luis Hernandez was refusing to do his homework. By his own count, he finished fewer than ten assignments in six years, was reprimanded for it almost daily, and didn’t care. What changed his mind wasn’t a teacher but his older brother, who was a dedicated student and dared his younger brother to earn straight A’s. Sibling competition may have been the motivator but by the end of high school, Luis, who had struggled with basic division was at the top of his calculus courses, and enrolled in college to earn a computer science degree.
Which is where NTS sneaks into the story. His university handed him one more assignment. Not only did he turn this one in on time, he submitted twice what was required, and continued working on it for two more years.
That assignment was us – NTS.
How we found Luis
Typically, we’d be telling you that we went out and recruited a software engineer. We didn’t. In late 2024, Luis was in his senior year and enrolled in a course called Race, Gender, Class in the Digital World,. This class required students to volunteer with an outside organisation to solve a real-world problem. NTS was on the list of possible partners.
Why did Luis pick us? The answer starts in his hometown Salinas, California, a low-income agricultural town. Like many families there, the Hernandez family struggled financially. His parents came to California to build a better life. They had been born in a small village with so little access to education that, in Luis’s telling, they did not know Earth was a planet or that other planets shared the same galaxy. In Salinas, they raised a family and worked in the fields every day for years. Luis credits them with teaching their children about hard work and accomplishment by example. Today three of their children hold advanced STEM degrees.
So when Luis read the NTS mission in that university classroom, he didn’t deliberate. “Given the background of my own family, there was zero chance I wouldn’t help provide education to others in need.”
At school, the assignment was simple. In two months, create one web application, submit it and move on.
What Luis didn’t expect was a school running on spreadsheets. We were a bare-bones, Excel-driven operation. While we knew exactly what information we needed to track and record, we didn’t have a system to analyze it. So, every term the files grew larger, and the numbers denser, and it would take hours to try and extract meaning. We were desperate for a solution, with no idea where to start.
Luis had never done consulting work. He was honest, asking us to describe the problem. Then he worked through what was actually broken rather than what merely sounded broken, and came back with a proposal. Two months later he handed over two basic applications instead of the single one he owed, which he credits to the weekly meetings and lots of trial and error.
The part where he was supposed to leave
The course ended, we submitted an overwhelmingly positive evaluation, and by every reasonable expectation that was that.
But Luis had a lot of ideas and kept meeting with us. He was on fire. There was so much to learn and to do for NTS.
Over the following months he took a course on internet programming, taught himself new frameworks and presented an idea larger than anything we had ever envisioned.
The two applications he had built for NTS needed somewhere to live, so they had gone up on a subdomain of the school website which was our staff portal. But the architecture underneath the portal was dated and it was never going to grow with the school. Luis wanted to knock the whole thing down and rebuild it as a standalone system that could handle many more database operations. This was new to Luis so he sought mentorship from a school professor and then presented NTS with a proposal for his senior-year capstone project. We jumped at the chance.
So, the system Nyamboyo Technical School applications run on today began as a capstone project.
The portal
Jump back a decade. Luis discovered technology the way many children do, playing video games. Initially, he was lured in by the fantasy of living in game worlds. But, as he got older, what intrigued him was the craft – the beauty and imagination of these worlds. He began to ask, “How do people create a digital experience that feels like a magical portal to another world?” He learned about programmers and artists working side by side, which, while less magical, hooked him on a career in technology.
Today, Luis is a software engineer. NTS’ staff portal holds eight applications all of which he designed. Ask him which one brings him the greatest pride and he goes straight to the student health application, which manages student health records and raises a flag when a student’s measurements start moving in the wrong direction. Building it meant turning official CDC growth reference data into a working database table, a problem he found genuinely novel and rewarding. Still that isn’t the reason he names it. “Most of all, I’m exhilarated that the student health application can help students stay healthy, which is more important than anything.”
The young boy who was captivated by portals into other worlds, built one into ours.
Still this hasn’t been a one-way relationship. In two years at NTS, Luis has learned how to design a system from nothing, to listen to people who may not be engineers but who know the problem best, and to mentor the volunteer engineers who came after him. He freelances now, working on large professional projects and is soon beginning graduate school for computer science. He hopes to grow a company that permanently commits part of itself to nonprofit work. “Nearly everyone can always devote at least some time towards good causes, regardless of how busy they are.”
Building something out of nothing
There’s a pattern in the Hernandez family, and it has nothing to do with software.
His parents built a life out of a piece of California that offered them modest living but great opportunity. He has spent two years doing a version of the same thing for a school half a world away.
Our students will probably never meet him. Yet, today, they are using the library application that Luis built to find the books they want to read in our new library. So everyday, Luis is a part of their lives.
Want to support what is happening at NTS? www.nyamboyotechnical.org