Programming in a Pandemic

When Avi Schiffman was 7 years old he started teaching himself about computers. Now, at age 17, he runs one of the world’s most visited web sites from his home in Washington State. The site, nCoV2019.live, provides up-to-the-minute information about Covid-19 cases and deaths around the world. At first, Avi thought the website would just be an interesting project. He had no idea it would take the world by storm.

Science World recently spoke with Avi about why he built his Covid-19 tracker. He shares how he learned to program, or write instructions that tell a computer what to do, and what it’s like to maintain one of the world’s most popular sites—all from his bedroom.

For me, the best way to figure out new things is to start a project and learn as I go. One example is how to make a website load quickly on someone’s phone or computer so the site is interesting and easy to use.

My advice for anyone who wants to learn new computer programming skills is to start small and learn by doing. You don’t have to know everything about HTML—the computer language used to display things like text and images on websites—before you start making a site. Just learn one little thing, like how to write HTML code to change a website’s color, and go from there.

Before making this site I made a site for my school that pulled together the sports scores for all the schools in my county. I called it School Sports and it looked a lot like ESPN’s website, which was pretty cool. It used a technology called web scraping. It’s a way to gather lots of data from many websites quickly, using a computer code that I wrote. I used the same idea for my Covid-19 site. Health departments all around the world are always updating and posting their statistics online, and web scraping is the best way to get that information as soon as it is available.

By February or March it was so hard! Health departments kept changing their formats for their Covid-19 case numbers. One day they might display data in a table, the next day a PDF document. So I had to build web scrapers to get data from every kind of format. Now, thankfully, the formatting of more recent data has become standardized.