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Urgent Help: Requesting Exit letter For US Visa Reasons #260
Description
Agenda
- To get an Exit letter to confirm my volunteer participation with the Data Science team from August 14, 2023, to September 11, 2023.
- To discuss the format and details needed for a confirmation letter on the Hack for LA letterhead, which will serve as evidence for my visa renewal process.
- To clarify any documentation or verification steps required on my end to facilitate this request.
Activity
Rabia2219 commentedon Oct 17, 2025
@harshamanojkolla99
Hi Harsha,
We did an audit on your activity (via GitHub and a Google drive search) and we see that you were assigned to work on the Builtwith project but cannot find any evidence that you contributed to any work to it. If you have any documents that you worked on, or other artifacts, please provide them.
We searched the following time period:
2023-08-14 - 2023-10-23
from your own repo: https://github.com/harshamanojkolla99, shows that you were not active on GitHub at all during the period.
Activity Screenshot
The issue for the Builtwith project Neighborhood Council Website technologies #44 shows the following activity, a team member assigning you to the issue, but no updates by you during that period:
Screenshot of Issue Activity
The commits for the project folder show no commits by anyone in the time period
Screenshot of the commits page
harshamanojkolla99 commentedon Oct 18, 2025
Hi @Rabia2219 ,
Thank you for your quick reply to my issue. I'd like to clarify the situation regarding my involvement and the BuiltwithAPI project.
I was only actively contributing to the organization for a much shorter period: from August 14, 2023, to September 11, 2023, as I had to depart unexpectedly. This is why there is no activity from me on GitHub.
Regarding the work on issue #44, I did write code for the BuiltWith API project and regularly attended meetings with my team lead (Sophia Alice). The reason it was never committed to the repository is that I was still in discussions with the team to get approval to commit it. Unfortunately, my departure occurred before I could get that approval and merge the work.
I have attached the code I worked on for the task here as an artifact of my contributions.
BuiltwithAPI_44_HackforLA- harsha.zip
Summarizing the work I did:
Also, attaching the offer letter I received from Bonnie.
Harsha_Manoj_Kolla_offer_letter..pdf
This is the email sent to me by Bonnie on Aug 29, 2023.
HackForLA_OfferLetterEmail.pdf
I apologize for not being able to submit my work before leaving. Due to visa regulations, I’m not permitted to work for two organizations simultaneously, and I had to resign immediately to remain compliant.
This letter is very important for me, as I need it to provide documentation confirming my involvement with the organization during the stated time period. Thank you for looking into this matter — your support would be a great help for me to continue with my VISA process
ExperimentsInHonesty commentedon Oct 19, 2025
@harshamanojkolla99 I have uploaded the files you provided to the Data Science drive in the Issue #44 folder and will ask the current leadership of the CoP to evaluate the work you have done. What is not clear is how much time this work took, since you didn't document setbacks. I will have to try to reach out to Sophia for details of her recolection. She is no longer with Hack for LA.
ExperimentsInHonesty commentedon Oct 19, 2025
Notes:
Ran through ChatGPT to get a rough estimate of how much time it took to perform the work when comparing original file to the file provided by author of this issue. results: 18 hours given the little information I provided it. I was hoping it would show 4 weeks of work (4 x 20 = 80).
Assuming 1 hour of meeting time each week for 4 weeks: 4
ChatGPT work estimate (very rough because missing details): 18
= 22 hours
missing 58 hours
harshamanojkolla99 commentedon Oct 19, 2025
@ExperimentsInHonesty
Hi Bonnie,
Thanks for sharing that analysis. The missing 58 hours were the essential setup and investigation time that isn't visible in the code files. As a junior at the time, I took it as a challenging work; I was starting from scratch with no prior experience in Docker or web scraping.
My time was spent on these phases:
Environment Setup (~25 hrs): This was all spent learning, installing, and troubleshooting Docker just to get a working project environment. I faced a lot of errors while installing and had to reinstall multiple versions to finally get it working.
Failure in execution of Old Code (~20 hrs): This was time spent fixing dependencies involved running the old code and I had to watch a lot of youtube videos to fix the errors as needed to execute the code.
New Solution Research (~13 hrs): I spent time understand the existing code and concepts related to it. This was for learning the new tools (requests and BeautifulSoup) required to build the final, working script.
These 58 hours of prerequisite work were necessary before the 22 hours of final development could even start. The 80 hours I logged were the genuine and total time I spent on the project. I'm happy to discuss everything over a call if needed.
Thank you for your understanding.