🌍 Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Collaboration across cultures and disciplines is at the heart of innovation. During my experiences with Summer of Tech, GovHack, and Parkable, I worked alongside people from diverse cultural, linguistic, and technical backgrounds — spanning New Zealand, India, Iran, China, and Europe. These projects deepened my understanding of teamwork, empathy, and communication in global software development contexts.
🏕️ Summer of Tech Create Camp 2023
I spent two days at Summer of Tech’s Create Camp 2023, collaborating with four amazing teammates — William Bryant, N. Erkam Yildirim, Thin Lai Wai Oo, and Agnes Lo — under the guidance of mentor Peter Lee. Several enthusiastic mentors like Gavin McFall, Noah Irving, and April C. provided hands-on support, including a mentor from Pakistan who introduced me to parsing JSON data.
It was my second time hearing the Māori Karakia prayer — a meaningful cultural experience that strengthened my sense of belonging in New Zealand. During our group project presentation, I was inspired by other teams building civic technology solutions, like a depression warning system responding to Auckland’s rainstorm crisis.
Our team focused on a dog-friendly places app using API integration and user scenario simulation. Collaborating with William enhanced my proficiency in Git Continuous Integration workflows. It was an unforgettable journey of learning, teamwork, and friendship. 🌟
🏛️ Citizen Council Connect — GovHack 2023
At GovHack 2023, our team developed Citizen Council Connect — a civic engagement platform to strengthen communication between residents and the Christchurch City Council. The system visualizes maintenance schedules, outages, and service updatesacross the city and allows citizens to submit concerns directly to the responsible departments.
We also implemented a sentiment analysis model to interpret public opinions from social media data. This helped councils identify misinformation, understand public priorities, and design more targeted outreach campaigns. It was a valuable lesson on how data science can strengthen democratic governance.
🔗 Project link: GovHack →
🚀 Parkable Software Internship 2024
As a Software Development Intern at Parkable, I collaborated with Carlos Aguilar and Ankita Dharneon the product team, tackling UI enhancements and backend tickets across the stack. The environment fostered creativity, inclusivity, and mutual growth — everyone brought their unique energy and perspective to the table.
Parkable’s team culture exemplifies what I value most in technology: empathy-driven innovation. Working alongside diverse engineers and designers taught me that cross-cultural collaboration is not just an advantage — it’s a catalyst for better ideas, better code, and better communities.