Emblazoned on many students’ laptop screens is CheckPCR, an application that improves the user friendliness and overall functionality of the PCR system by allowing students to customize settings and set reminders. For the most part, students take this for granted, leaving a CheckPCR tab open in the background, with many not even opening the original PCR since they switched. Behind this subtly innovative program is the brains of one programmer—Ryan Adolf (12).

Ryan is like many other students at The Harker School—or any school in the Silicon Valley, for that matter—in that he is deeply invested in computer science and everything it has to offer. But Ryan’s dedication to CS is especially driven, growing from a fascination with Lego Mindstorms in elementary school to a determination to build his own computer from scratch.

He started CheckPCR in middle school and continued improving it throughout freshman year and the summer of sophomore year. Now, he mostly makes tweaks every now and then to update it.

“I started [programming] in elementary school when my parents bought me the Lego Mindstorms stuff and I was also taking Scratch classes,” Ryan said. “Eventually, they got me this Python book and with that, I finally had a proper programing language. I could do a lot more”

His friend Henry Wong (12) describes him as “very kind, very cheerful all the time.” At the Pacific Tiger Invitational cross country meet, a mascot dance was announced where representatives from each school could wear their respective school’s mascot and dance in a circle. Despite the sweltering heat, Ryan volunteered to don the eagle costume.

“We were just fooling around, telling people to wear [the eagle costume], we never had someone go for the dance and Ryan was like ‘Yeah okay I’ll wear it’ and then he put it on,” Henry said. “You could see during the dance he wanted to take the helmet off — he was trying to pull it up. At the end when he takes it off he’s very very sweaty, it’s like he’s drenched in the shower.”

His peers in Harker Dev echo Henry’s thoughts. “Ryan is really smart and also really nice,” Akshay Manglik (10), a fellow Harker Dev member said. “He loves to code and works on all sorts of projects like Harker Pay, but he also likes to help the newer members with coding.”

However, despite all of his accolades, he maintains a humble and carefree attitude, admirable traits in the cutthroat tech industry.

“The most effective thing for me to be doing is probably just inspiring people,” Ryan said. “It’s a very small chance that I’d be able to do something to change the world, so maybe I’ll help that if I inspire a thousand different people.”