Chocolate entrepreneur turned techie. What's next for Shatish?

Watch the full interview here :

In this episode of Stories of Hackers, we talked with Shatish. Shatish is a long-term player in the F&B industry, chocolate manufacturing to be specific but he has always been passionate about tech startups and coding. He joined The Hacker Collective in early 2020 to learn the Vuejs Framework and became a Jumpstarter for other beginner batches. In this session, Shatish will be sharing his personal journey on how he became a coder/techie from a traditional business and marketing background. We hope you guys can learn some new insights from Shatish’s story and his experience, enjoy!

Hey Shatish, can you give a short introduction about yourself to our community members?

Hey guys,  just to introduce myself, my name is Shatish and I'm in the chocolate and tea manufacturing business, which is my family business. For some time, I have always had the idea of exploring programming and technology so I am mainly doing a lot of self-study.

I think this was before mco last year when i was looking for a group to study and found The Hacker Collective (THC), i was looking for like-minded people to learn code and you know like exchange ideas together. So when I saw the Facebook ad for THC, I joined the community and that’s how I met these guys, Ming, Deric and a few others.

I wanted to learn the Vue framework because before that I already had some experience with Angular. I went for like a basic bootcamp but mostly when I first started coding was more towards python and all that so like bits and pieces here and there so when I was with hacker collective, I  wanted to be able to bring it all together.

It was last year where the MCO happened and everyone was forced to stay at home. Deric asked me to join as one of the mentors where I shared with the members some of the basics of HTML and CSS and that’s how I started my journey in tech.

You mentioned earlier that you went to a bootcamp before, what happened to your group? Why didn't you continue to study there?

I joined the Asian Developer Bootcamp by BAC College and it was more like a tutor-student kind of thing,  there's a syllabus and then you learn that and all that but I want to work on projects and you know, experiment things. I think mainly most of them at the bootcamp, they're looking to get a job or get into, like looking for a career but for me I wanted to work on projects but yeah it's not easy to find people like that. At The Hacker Collective, it's more flexible, we work on projects that we want to do and we do cover the basics but we can work on our own interests as well.

How do you feel like teaching programming as someone who is back then you were probably not as experienced as you were now? How was the whole experience and why did you even do it?

Basically during the lockdown, I was trying a lot of new things like I purposely put myself in an uncomfortable situation for growth. I also know that when you teach, you learn better. When you're teaching someone, you find all the gaps in between and by the time you're having a tutorial,  it's already like second nature for you.I know what the student is going through so it makes it easier for me to explain to them.

So if i’m not mistaken, you came from a business background right? Maybe you can share a bit more about that too.

Well, actually I didn't do any business studies or anything like that. In fact, I actually did piloting back in 2007 or 2008, a long time ago so by the time I completed in 2010 there's a bad market for pilots. It was the time of the previous recession thus i decided to join the family business just to learn the ropes of it. 

The manufacturing and traditional business is quite taxing that means everything is manual and

then there's not so much digital marketing involved. When I saw  my peers when they were going to startups or into digital marketing, coding fields. It sparked my interest and I was curious about what that was. I attended a lot of conferences and meetups and it was during one of the conferences, I met with an IOS developer from Mindvalley, and he’s actually the person that got me interested in coding. He was doing a prank call to the girl on the conference stage by just running a code so when I saw that thing, it just blew my mind and that's how I started my journey of looking into programming and code.

What’s the thing that you wish someone would have told you from day one of coding/programming?

Number one thing,  don't do it by yourself, find a group of people to learn from and do it together.I actually use the principle for anything that i'm doing nowadays, whether it's coding or business or any new ideas. You can only learn so much through videos or books or whatever  but when you meet people and then the experience you get from them, you can't buy that anywhere. 

If given another choice again, would you choose self learn or bootcamp? 

There's pros and cons but I think what The Hacker Collectively is doing is like the hybrid of both where you're self-learning but then there's also the bootcamp feel. You have the flexibility of doing anything that you want but you're still covering the bases like all the important topics. Bootcamp is very structured where you go through the all those exercises but at THC,  you do the same here but you still can work on your own projects and you're free to try different things like different technology different tools so you're not really restricted, i think a hybrid model will be the one i prefer. 

Interesting...now here’s the age old question of which programming language you need to start with?

I would say just pick one, that's what I would have done differently from the start. I would just pick something, a simple language, just learn programming itself, the syntax. Don't worry about what you want to do, like you can pick python, javascript or anything. Don't pick the best language, learn programming, just learn all the basic concepts and then once you understand the basics, you can learn any syntax and any programming languages that you want.

How did you manage to broaden your options for your career by picking up this really useful skill?

After learning about  these technology skills, basically whatever I want to build, maybe there’s any software out there that I need.  I don't have to purchase or subscribe to it, I can build it myself which is way cheaper.I wouldn't really recommend to everyone but I mean once you really learn the basics then you can find on Github there's all the open source codes where you can literally find a lot of simple tools that you can do for yourself so whatever.

Thanks for the awesome interview!

Hope you enjoyed this series!

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