We recently had another amazing guest speaker, Ankur Kumar, Outbound Product Manager at Twilio (www.twilio.com). Ankur grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. He has an interesting coding story which has brought him back to the Charleston area to live and work remotely.
When Ankur was about eight years old he started playing an online game called Runescape. He had a passion for it and invested significant time in it. He also spent a lot of time with another game called MafiaCrime.org (test based online game) at age 11, but was supposed to be 13 to be able to play. He became very passionate about the game, spending hours each day and even became a moderator for the game. At some point his age was discovered and his account was deactivated/removed.
He loved playing these types of games so much, he decided to learn how to code. If he couldn't play their game, he would make his own game. Ankur didn’t know how to code at that time but by modifying his MySpace account he learned some HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).
Ankur found a company called MC Codes that sold prepackaged coding for games like Mafia Crime to have a starting foundation. He then found a place to host his game for free, 000Webhost.com. With that, he was able to launch his new game for FREE, but at that point he just knew how to login and open files. The prepackaged coding was written in HMTL, CSS (Front End) with PHP (Backend). The PHP was Spaghetti Code and difficult to interpret. . .
Ankur learned about coding initially by sheer effort, reading it over and over and looking at similar parts of code and modifying, then seeing what happened. He was able to offer features, upgrades and modifications in the game for small online payments. Secretly he was coding, but Ankur thought it was bad.
He was investing lots of time and finding it difficult to balance it with other things he wanted to do. It came down to a point of participating in a Swim Meet or an In-Game event. Ankur realized he was letting the online gaming take up too much of his time and attention, so he took a break from it for a year or so playing football and competing in swim meets.
Ankur then went to George Washington High School, where he signed up for a Computer Science class. He was well experienced and once the teacher understood his ability, Ankur was asked to help manage the High School website. He took on that challenge by writing a program that was a portal that his fellow students could use to update the website. At the time, the website was hosted on a computer/server at the high school. Ankur used HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript with this project.
Ankur loved coding, the ability to solve problems and build things that people would use.
Ankur attended West Virginia University and majored in Computer Science. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the way he wanted to learn coding. Freshman year, Ankur wrote off coding as a career and switched his major to Industrial Engineering.
Soon after, Jen Susman with 84 Agency (84agency.com) reached out to see if he would help fill a need for building websites because of his work on his high school’s website. One of his first projects was for the WV Coalition for Domestic Violence. He learn coding from taking a huge project and working through the various parts. He continued to work on website projects throughout college to earn money and continue his passion for coding.
Fast forward to his Senior year of college. There was a State Bill that needed more attention for citizens to become aware of and weigh in on. He was asked if he could make a website informing people about the bill. Ankur thought about how to take this information to reach people. He explored how to leverage Twitter to increase awareness about the bill, then learned about APIs (Application Programming Interface), and how software talks to each other. In 2018, he connected to Twitter’s API, allowing people to Tweet through the app he built. At the end of this campaign, they had over 2,000 people tweet about the Bill.
Ankur realized that he belongs here (coding). During his first two years out of college he freelanced through Reddit. One of his projects was a Text to Donate app, updating as people donated. He utilized tools through Twilio allowing people to use the app to interact with text messaging.
Another project Ankur worked on was with the WV Child Advocacy Network, that wanted to have one effort that could benefit all 23 different organizations statewide. He created a portal with Stripe (API) which allowed for a central portal donation option, that could be send to the specific organization chosen.
COVID happened and Ankur’s freelance opportunities tanked. The first few months of COVID were very difficult. Freelancing work by its nature can be feast or famine, but this was definitely a time of famine. Ankur asked Twillo staff -”do you hire people like me?” Within a few weeks he got a job there. Ankur doesn't code as much now, but he has learned a tremendous amount about SMS (Short Message Service). APIs are now available for AI (Artificial Intelligence) and he is really excited about them.
Ankur shows from his experience that you can be a coder without being a Computer Science major.
Ankur's advice:
Pick a project and do it. Choose something you don’t know how to do and pick it apart. It may seem very complicated and could take weeks, but think about it and eventually it will click.
If you’re thinking about hard things, expect it to be hard.
Be patient.
For High School - you can afford to be super bold, like message people on LinkedIn with a big company. Most High Schoolers are doing other stuff.
Coding is such a wild discipline, building all the time, so there is always something new coming out.
Pick something and learn it really well and build with it.
Don’t get lost in the sauce, you don’t have to learn every new thing that comes out.
Ankur now happily works remotely in Charleston, West Virginia, after spending a couple years in California.
Dan McElroy, President of the West Virginia Coding Club said, "Ankur is another great example of a West Virginian choosing coding as a career, working remotely and choosing to live in West Virginia. We appreciate him sharing his unique story and giving our WV Coding Club students great advice.
Keep Coding!