Throughout the summer, Skandalaris Center Summer Internship Program participants will be writing guest blog posts about their internship experience. Following is one such post. 

By Nell Downey (LA ’21) and Kedar Bell (EN ’21)

I’m Nell Downey, a sophomore studying Economics and Strategy and Global Health at WashU. This summer I’m working as an intern at Adalo (formerly Foundry Platform), doing marketing and strategy. Adalo is a SaaS web platform that allows users to create custom native apps without code. To try out the platform or to read more about Adalo’s cofounders and their vision, visit https://www.adalo.com/.

Recently, I’ve been focusing on developing and implementing a launch plan for Adalo, as it’s still in its beta-testing stage— we’ve set a goal for an early August launch. A major part of my job here has been working with the co-founders to rebrand the platform, which was formerly known as Foundry Platform. The co-founders Ben, David, and Jeremy initially chose Foundry to represent how the platform gave people the power to create and build their own apps, but ultimately decided that Adalo was a better fit. Our new name (pronounced ah-dah-lo) is inspired by Ada Lovelace, who is widely considered to be the world’s first computer programmer. Her life’s work fits with Adalo’s mission of empowering people to turn their ideas into reality.

At the moment, I’m working on building a series of tutorials and other resources to make creating apps on Adalo even more intuitive for those who have no experience with design or development.

I’m Kedar Bell, a junior studying Computer Science. In preparation for Adalo’s August Launch, I’ve been working on many new features as well as bug fixes for the overall application.

For example, many of our clients wanted graphing functionality, so that data collected from their applications could be displayed in a more visually appealing way. To support this need, I developed a bar chart and line chart component using JavaScript, a flexible coding language. To help better the user experience, I also modified the structure of how users invite team members on sign up, as well as adding team members to work on team applications. These core tasks have taught me a lot. I have been able to apply much of the programming knowledge I have learned in the classroom in new and creative ways. Compared to the classroom, working on a live product has been a completely different experience. The changes I make have the potential to make or break a product, which is a lot of responsibility, but also is very exciting. If you want to check out what I’ve been working on, head over to https://www.adalo.com/. Both the bar chart and line chart components are live in our web application, so feel free to explore their functionality, as well as the rest of the app. With Adalo, you can make apps in a snap.