Co-Founder & Co-Lead

Open Coding Society is Del Norte’s computer science program: a four-year pathway where students ship real code to real AWS-hosted infrastructure. It already had the students and the culture. What it didn’t have was a guided way into AI, and especially into AI safety and security, which is where there’s a real talent gap and almost nothing serious aimed at 16-to-18-year-olds.

So Nikhil Maturi and I started one. The older students, about 50 of them, work in 8 project teams of around 6, each with a mentor from a pool of 12+ volunteers: engineers from Qualcomm, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics, San Diego founders, and retired professors. Each team writes a real proposal with a technical question, a budget, milestones and a deliverable, in areas like edge AI, computer vision, and agentic AI for cybersecurity. Everything is meant to be open source.

The younger students, about 100 of them, get access. The best AI tools cost a monthly subscription, which splits a class into students who can experiment and students who can’t. Serving models from hardware the program owns fixes that, and owned hardware also stays useful for every class after this one.

That hardware has to come from somewhere, which is my main job: I write the grant applications. So far that’s 9 applications, ranging from $500 microgrants to a $60,000 in-school AI lab, plus requests for AI credits and for introductions to programs where students can keep going. The first award came through as $1,000 in Cohere credits.

We’ll know it’s working if projects actually finish with something tangible, like a working build, a result or a poster, and if students go on to AI safety programs afterward.