This engineer is mapping all the public basketball courts in DC

Rodney Cobb feels pretty confident when it comes to his programming skills. But designing a product with an end user in mind? He could use some help with that.

“I’m much more ones and zeros, you know?” said Cobb, who’s currently traveling between D.C. and San Francisco, working with folks to diversify the tech workforce. (He used to work out of the WeWork Wonderbread Factory but no longer has a permanent space in D.C.)
That’s one of the reasons why Cobb applied to the Black upStart Bootcamp, a six-day program that selects 20 African-American entrepreneurs every year who are looking to start their own businesses. Kezia Williams, founder and program director of the initiative, told Technical.ly they host bootcamps at the RISE Demonstration Center in Anacostia and also serves the Baltimore area. He’s now crowdfunding through Aug. 25 on GoFundMe for the $500 tuition — crowdfunding tuition is something the program encourages each accepted applicant to do in order to get into that entrepreneurial mindset. He’s almost halfway to his goal.
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Cobb’s business idea, which he’s already developing, is a mobile app called I Got Ball that maps the locations of all the public basketball courts in a city.
He hopes to give children and teenagers an easy-to-use resource for going outside and getting active. So far, he’s mapped courts in New York City, Philadelphia and D.C., although he points out there really aren’t many courts in the DMV area.

At Black upStart Bootcamp, he hopes to learn how to make the app visually appealing for users to interact with and how to determine his target audience.
Cobb actually developed a minimum viable product for the app back in 2012, but it was during this past Fourth of July weekend when he decided he wanted to build out the app more fully.
Why the sudden motivation? One motivator for Cobb was to prove his prowess amid the whiteness of the tech world, something that was made more apparent to Cobb during his recent interviews at tech companies.

When you walk in the office for a #techinterview and no one looks like you, red alarm! Lol #techinterviews #engineeringwhileblack

— Rodney Cobb (@facetherathe) July 26, 2016

“I’ve been told that I wasn’t smart enough to work somewhere and you just kind of look at them like, ‘Really? Are you serious?’” he said.

During a #technical interview is it professional to ask the interviewee "Where did you learn all this stuff?" #dctech #techinterviews

— Rodney Cobb (@facetherathe) July 26, 2016

While I Got Ball may be a new kind of entrepreneurial challenge for Cobb, it’s not his first foray into using tech to create helpful tools — he cofounded GovReady in 2013 as an open source tool to make it easier for federal agencies and government contractors to deliver digital services to citizens more efficiently, specifically when it comes to complying with the Federal Information Security Management Act.
He was also one of the coders behind BaltimoreLunch.org, the website created in response to the lack of school lunches for kids during the Baltimore protests last summer.
“Right now, tech is one of those avenues that moves the needle very quickly so we have to be able to affect change in some form or fashion, instead of just sitting around,” he said. “There’s a whole larger segment of society that is not as comfortable as we are.”