(Archive)Where it started
High School
Where it all started: a few summer coding camps around middle school, then the Code.org & Scratch projects in 10th grade that were the first I wrote on my own, then the iOS apps I taught myself to build after the IB exams, plus the flyers and wallpapers I designed for clubs and the community.
- NoneMinaret
- HawksCielo Vista
- RoadrunnersRSM
- MustangsTrabuco Hills
- AnteatersUC Irvine
Before Trabuco 159 pictures · 2006 – 2020 · + the ID cards
Through the Years 769 pictures · 2020 – 2024
Programming Projects Code.org, Scratch & Java
All of these are small, and nearly all of them are from 10th grade. 11th is generally the busiest year of high school and mine was no exception: nine classes, IB internal assessments, and APs to sit at the end of it, so there was very little time left over for building things.
Then the IB exams finished, and that is when I found what I actually wanted to do. I taught myself iOS development, and my first app was Datapad: the Code.org Star Wars Datapad from 10th grade, finally a real app on the App Store. Back in 10th grade that was the dream, and I never thought it would actually happen. Al-Islam came later that summer, then Al-Quran and Al-Adhan a few months after that, in 12th grade.
Apps I Shipped in High School 11th & 12th grade
Five apps written and shipped to the App Store between junior year and graduation, two of which went on to win the Congressional App Challenge and the Swift Student Challenge.
View My Apple Developer Page↗ (opens in a new tab)Awards & Honors
- 2022 · 10th
First Place, Orange County American Chemical Society first-year exam
Recognized at school and community level for academic excellence in chemistry: first at my school, with 63.1 out of 90 against a county average of 58.
- 2022 · 11th
IB Knowledgeable Award
Given at our first IB banquet for contribution to class discussion and overall achievement, chosen from the 72 students in the IB Diploma class.
- 2023 · 11th
AP Scholar with Distinction
Average of at least 3.5 across all AP exams with 3 or higher on five or more. Ended with a 5 on six exams and a 4 on three.
- 2023 · 11th
Career Technical Education Award
For two years of computer science coursework.
- 2018–23
7th–11thPerfect Attendance
From 7th grade through 11th, apart from tennis match bus days and one sick day.
- 2023 · 12th
ICOI Certificate for App Development Achievement
For building and maintaining the ICOI app: prayer times, events and more.
- 2023 · 12th
Winner: Congressional App Challenge, Best Original App Idea
Issued by the United States CongressDecember 2023Awarded in my senior year of high school
Won with Al-Islam, and awarded a Certificate of Congressional Recognition by U.S. Representative Young Kim. The Arabic Beginner Mode and Traveling Mode were singled out, both of which I built to support new Muslims and learners of Arabic. I wrote the app after finishing my AP and IB exams.
- 2024 · 12th
IB Best Performance at Banquet
For the speeches at the final senior IB banquet, including for two retiring IB teachers.
- 2024
OC Register: Valedictorians and top scholars, Class of 2024
Featured in the Orange County Register’s round-up for the graduating class.
- 2024 · 12th
Winner: Apple Swift Student Challenge
Issued by AppleJune 2024Awarded in my senior year of high school
One of 350 winners selected from thousands of high school and college students worldwide, won with Al-Quran while still in high school. Attended WWDC 2024 days after graduating, met Tim Cook and saw Apple Park.
The Al-Islam Writing junior & senior year · 2023
Two documents about Al-Islam from the year I wrote it. The first is my own, handed to Ms. Kerawalla, my sophomore and junior year computer science teacher, in May 2023, while the app was still unpublished: it runs from the Code.org projects that came before it (the Aurebesh translator, the wallpaper maker, Hangman and Wordle) through to what Al-Islam could do at that point. The second is what she wrote after it won the Congressional App Challenge that December, with my own account of the journey quoted inside it.
Backstory · 24 May 2023 · 11th
Congressional App Challenge · Ms. Kerawalla · 12th
WWDC 2024 the Swift Student Challenge · Apple Park · June 2024
Apple picks a few hundred Swift Student Challenge (opens in a new tab) winners out of tens of thousands of submissions. I was one of 350 worldwide in 2024, for Al-Quran, written in my senior year, with a personal letter from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Relations team to go with it. And the real prize came attached: an invitation to the Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino. I flew up days after graduating, still technically a high schooler: walking Apple Park, meeting Tim Cook, and standing under the WWDC24 sign. Easily the highlight of the four years on this page.
See the 2024 winners on WWDCScholars↗ (opens in a new tab)
Swift Student Challenge · Issued by AppleJune 2024Awarded in my senior year of high school
Every winner is listed on WWDCScholars, the community directory of Swift Student Challenge and WWDC Scholarship winners going back to 2012. The 2024 list runs alphabetically by first name, which puts Abubakr first on the page.
See the 2024 winners on WWDCScholars↗ (opens in a new tab)
Custom Flyers
Minecraft Workshop2021
Star Wars Workshop2022
Code Combat Workshop2022
CyberPatriot2023
Girls Who Code2023
Muslim Student Assoc.2023
Blood Drive2024
Computer Science Classes2024
Environmental Science2024
Custom Wallpapers
Palestine, Phone, Laptop and Desktop are the finished set. The two marked original are earlier versions, the first ones I made before the others, and they are not great; they are here as where it started.
Online, Along the Way elementary school to 12th grade
116 WPM, 98%10th grade · Aug 2021
153 WPM, 96%: a personal best11th grade · spring 2023
179 WPM, 100%: a personal best12th grade · fall 2023
Arc: Imaginary Inventor11th grade · Dec 2022
Arc: Gifted Mastermind11th grade · Dec 2022
Arc: one badge11th grade
Arc: two badges11th grade
Academics Class of 2024
Graduated from Trabuco Hills High School on 30 May 2024 with the IB Diploma, nine AP exams, and dual-enrolment coursework at Saddleback College.
UC GPA is the University of California’s standardized GPA, calculated only from 10th and 11th grade a-g courses with a capped number of honors/AP bonus points. CSU GPA was 4.15. 330 credits attempted, 330 completed.
The programming languages I knew by graduation:
- Swift
- Java
- Python
- JavaScript
- Scratch, where it started
Concurrent enrolment: real college classes at Saddleback College alongside 11th and 12th grade, the same four terms that open the college transcript.
Fall 2022
11th gradeSaddleback College- ARAB 1Elementary Arabic 1
Spring 2023
11th gradeSaddleback College- ARAB 2Elementary Arabic 2
Summer 2023
before 12thSaddleback College- CIMP 235iPhone/iPad Programming
- CIMP 8APython Programming
Fall 2023
12th gradeSaddleback College- ARAB 3Intermediate Arabic
- CIMP 7AJava Programming
- HIST 74History of the Middle East
The Class Ring Trabuco Hills · Class of 2024
Two designs, each rendered in silver and in gold. The gem ring in silver is the one I actually got, and the one I still have; the band was only ever concept art. The gold ones are concept art too: gold is haram for men to wear, so it was never going to be gold, but the renders came out looking good. Under them is the order exactly as it was placed, on 8 October 2023.
The gem ring, the one I haveSilver
The band, concept artSilver
The gem ring, concept artGold
The band, concept artGold
- Ring
- Vanguard® – Men’s (T31)
- School
- Trabuco Hills High School (Mission Viejo, CA)
- Ordered
- 8 October 2023 · Jostens
- Palm Side
- Smooth Band (traditional)
- Stone 1
- Blue Spinel BLS
- Stone 2
- Blue Spinel BLS
- Ring Top Engraving
- ABUBAKR
- Ring Side 1
- School Mascot: THHS
- Ring Side 2
- 2024 VV2: TRABUCO
- Metal Quality
- White Lustrium®
- Metal Finish
- Antique
- Inside Engraving
- Full Name Block: ABUBAKR ELMALLAH THHS 2024
- Graduation Year
- 2024
- Ring Size
- 09.5
- Subtotal
- $348.99
- Discount
- −$25.00
- Service & Delivery
- $14.98
- Tax
- $25.88
- Order Total
- USD $364.85
Extracurriculars 2020 – 2024
All four years
- Muslim Student Association: secretary in 10th grade, then president for 11th and 12th. Weekly Jumuʿah on campus; I began giving khuṭbahs in 10th grade and led the prayer.
- Weekend Islamic school: fiqh and ʿaqīdah, and learning to recite the Quran properly with tajwīd.
- Quran recitation: recording Minshawi-style recitations (opens in a new tab) on my own channel, which is also where the tajwīd work behind Al-Quran started.
- Voice of learnsalah.com (2023): recorded the audio the site used to teach people how to pray. The site itself has since gone offline.
- CSF: active member across all four years, volunteering at events.
- Tennis, pickleball and ping pong: several times a week, mostly for the company.
By year
- 9th
JV tennis team: two hours a day, through a year of online school.
- 10th
Varsity tennis. Built my first real projects on code.org: Star Wars Datapad, a periodic table, a calculator, a wallpaper maker, and a games app with Wordle, Hangman and Checkers.
- 10th
Director of STEM Workshops for STEM Extreme: created and ran events teaching elementary schoolers to code, in person and online, among them Minecraft and Star Wars workshops on Code.org and a CodeCombat one over Zoom for 1st to 6th graders. Led the club’s other tutors, reached out to the organizations we worked with, and made the posters for each (the first three under Custom Flyers).
- 11th
Varsity tennis. Wrote Al-Islam and Datapad after AP and IB exams; see the apps above.
- 12th
Co-President of the CyberPatriot club: three hours a week over the six-week season.
- 12th
Helped create the ICOI Technology Committee and sat on the board; built the ICOI app. Shipped Al-Adhan and Al-Quran.
Community Service
Islamic Center of Irvine · grades 9–12
Many projects over the four years: website content, organizing Ramadan taraweeh prayers, running programs like the coffee chats, and building their iOS app.
CSF · grades 9–12
California Scholarship Federation, all four years: an active member across many of its events.
NHS · grades 11–12
Juniors and seniors only. Volunteered at events and organized my own at ICOI: the highest hour count in the chapter junior year at over 30, and around 50 by the end of senior year. Also a year of Key Club alongside it in 11th grade.
Work while still at school
-
Summer 20219th → 10th
Tennis Court Supervisor · South Orange County Tennis Academy
My coach offered me the job after 9th grade. Every weekend overseeing the local community courts: keeping them clean, in good condition, and players to the rules. First job, and the first time I was responsible for something on my own.
-
Feb 2024 – Feb 20262 yrs · part-time
iOS App Development Teacher · STEM Heroes Academy
After the ICOI app shipped I was asked to help build out the STEM academy at the Muslim Village, a new ICOI program. It was robotics only; I proposed an iOS course, and that proposal is what expanded the curriculum.
- Launched the academy’s first iOS App Development course as its youngest instructor, at 17, teaching Swift, Swift Playgrounds and SwiftUI to 30+ students aged 8–14, who each shipped a working app over the two years.
- Wrote the curriculum: Swift syntax, optionals, structs and classes, then UI with stacks, event-driven programming with gestures, and animations.
- Took students with no prior programming experience from their first line of code to an app running on a real iPhone, with a Quran app as the course’s final project.
- Taught it hands-on in Xcode, debugging alongside students rather than for them, and adjusted the pace per student across a wide age and skill range.
- The course widened the academy beyond robotics and laid the ground for the STEM programs that came after it.
- Taught Python at the academy as well as iOS.
Started in my senior year of high school and carried on through both years of college, finishing in February 2026.
Summer Coding Camps elementary & middle school · iD Tech & UCI APPcamp
Before any of the projects above, in the summers of elementary school and into middle school, I went to coding camps. I was a young kid who did not really know anything yet, so the instructors did a lot of the coding with me: this is where I first saw code, not where I first wrote it on my own. That came in 10th grade, with Order 66 and the Star Wars Datapad.
- probably summer 2016 · iD Tech · elementary
Star Wars Mod for Minecraft
A week of camp that produced a Minecraft 1.8 Forge mod in Java. It is the first card below.
- 31 Jul – 4 Aug 2017 · iD Tech · elementary
GEL Mod for Minecraft
The next summer, another week and another mod, this one entirely our own invention. It is the second card below.
- by 2018 · UCI · elementary
APPcamp 1.0
UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences: Scratch, and an Android app built in MIT App Inventor.
- July 2018 · UCI · into middle school
APPcamp 2.0
The follow-on week, July 23 to 27: from blocks to Python on a Raspberry Pi, and a team design challenge to build an app or game around a shared theme.
Minecraft Mods, the two that produced something
Both mods are on GitHub, kept exactly as they were built, with their Java recovered from the jars: Minecraft Mods from iD Tech ↗. The GEL Mod dates itself: Photoshop saved timestamps inside its textures, five days in a row, Monday 31 July to Friday 4 August 2017, one week of camp. The Star Wars Mod has no dates in it, so summer 2016 is a best guess from the clues: the last Forge build for Minecraft 1.8, and a Kylo Ren lightsaber, which cannot predate The Force Awakens.