Neeraj Aggarwal (12) has travelled to Dubai, Guatemala, Switzerland and Spain, but he admits that he spent much of his time looking through a viewfinder.

“My dad tells me to put the camera away a lot,” he said. “So I guess I get carried away, but at the same time, holding the camera helps me think [and] find different beauties in each society.”

Neeraj’s photos depict sprawling lakes and imposing buildings, everyday outfits awash in color. But he finds that sometimes the photos that aren’t technically perfect can carry the most meaning.

“In Spain, I took this picture of this street musician, and it was in the night and it was super grainy and really dark,” he said. “But when I increased the exposure and everything was still grainy, you could see a really big smile on his face, and [he was] holding his guitar. There were two children next to him. This picture, to me, is not something I could blow up and print, but that’s one of my favorite pictures just because of the moment that I captured, like the two kids enjoying the musician’s music and the musician enjoying the fact that the kids were there.”

Neeraj’s love of photography influences his approach toward design — he favors clean lines and prioritizes intuitive user experiences, from both the side of the consumer and the side of the developer.

“This philosophy specifically came from Steve Jobs,” Neeraj said. “In his book, in his biography, he talked to Walter Isaacson about how like one of his main inspirations was how designers said that true innovation that intersection of design and technology, and that’s kind of just stuck with me.”

In his five years of programming, he has created Elore, a startup intended to foster innovation by allowing students to share and collaborate on projects; contributed to Open Mind, a fake news detector and completed a plethora of smaller projects. He admits that he started out as a “messy kid” with regards to coding practices, but soon realized that addressing issues later was less efficient than maintaining readable code in the first place.

“You want it to be very methodical,” he said. “You don’t want it to be haphazard. Then you can’t really do much, you can’t extend the versatility of your projects to encompass more features. And so, to me design is not necessarily about being aesthetically pleasing, but it’s just about how you think things through and how you’re able to implement them to make them a reality.”

With computer science as pervasive as it is in Silicon Valley, it is sometimes difficult to discern who actually cares for the subject. But according to senior Alisa Su, Neeraj is one of those people.

“A lot of kids at our school say that they like a lot of computer science stuff, but Neeraj actually actively works on projects [and] goes to hackathons,” Alisa Su (12) said.

Neeraj finds himself spending long hours grappling with his code, motivated by his sheer will to complete the project at hand.

“I don’t there’s ever a time I didn’t like programming, but there’s some frustrating times where there you can sit in front of the computer for hours and not know what’s up,” he said. “You just have to go through code over and over again and just figure what’s happening, which can be really frustrating and really tiring when your eyes are watering. But once you crack the barrier, you kind of see that it was all worth it.”

Solitary hours gazing at laptop screens aside, necessitates collaboration. For example, take the process of documentation — totally unnecessary for the program to run, but indispensable to developers trying to understand their coworkers’ code.

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as the solitary programmer,” Neeraj said. “For example, if a so-called solitary programmer is on Stack Overflow copying code, he’s getting help from a community. Just in that way, even each programmer has a distinct way he implements things or a distinct mindset towards a project, in the end, I believe that everyone, the entire community is what drives each programmer to continue to grow and build.”