- Santosh Yadav grew up in a Mumbai slum before building a tech career in Germany
- He struggled with language barriers and academic challenges during his studies
- Started coding in 2008 and shifted roles from engineering manager to individual contributor
Santosh Yadav, a software professional's inspiring journey from growing up in a Mumbai slum to building a career in Germany, has drawn attention online. The buzz began when he recently shared an appreciation post for his wife, who stood by his side all these tough years. Some curious users noticed their before and after pictures and asked about their story. He then shared an old blog about his journey.
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He was born in Mumbai and lived in a slum as long as he can remember. "It was a typical slum which you see in movies - there were good people and a lot of bad people, too. I was lucky not to hang out with those bad people for long," he wrote in the old blog.
While pursuing a computer science course, he said he struggled with the language as English was his native language. "I studied in a school where Hindi was my first language, and I had accent issues as well," he wrote.
"I remember crying in a class because I couldn't understand a thing, and I was scared to fail again like I failed my expectations in 10th Standard."
Despite some setbacks, he completed the course.
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He began working at a Rs 5,000-a-month job. He then switched jobs and, step by step, he landed better roles in India, upskilled in in-demand areas like software development, and eventually secured an opportunity abroad. Today, he works in Germany's tech sector - a shift that reflects years of learning on the job and outside of it.
In a recent post, Yadav revealed that he started coding back in 2008 after falling in love with C# (C-Sharp). "After 2 years as an engineering manager, I moved back to an IC role in 2016," he wrote. "Things changed when I started contributing to open source in 2019. One thing led to another: I became an Angular GDE, a GitHub Star, spoke at 80+ conferences, and published 100s of videos."
"This year, I started working at CodeRabbit, where I get to follow my passion for open source and support open source maintainers."
