[Techie Tuesdays] India's favorite techies, voted by you
Last Tuesday, we presented you with our techies from 2014 and asked you to vote for your favorite techie. The voting process is over now and we are glad to see an overwhelming response. Every techie is amazing in his own way and it takes a great deal of patience and hardwork to realize one's dreams. It was very difficult for us to select one techie on our part out of the 40+ techies we profiled this year. Based on the votes received we bring you the top three techies who were close to the hearts of our readers and also handpicked stories by our editors.
Kiran Jonnalagadda - Out of all the techies we profiled this year, Kiran's was voted the most favourite by people. It received 17.24% votes and being one of the foremost people who have seen the community growing since the early days and has been a part of it too from a long time. Kiran started his career with 'CHIP' magazine. He was the youngest employee there. And he had not even completed his schooling by then.
Manish Bhattacharya - Manish's story is another example of hard work and perseverance. Though Manish is still a college student, it's not difficult to imagine him at the forefront of technology few years down the line. Having a talent for finding bugs in seemingly clean and secure applications. You talk about Dropbox or Github, Facebook or Spotify. Manish has found over 50 bugs in different applications till date and is always ready to jump at the prospect of finding vulnerabilities. Manish and Amod were the next two favorites with 13.79% of total votes each.
Our Picks
Apart from the above stories which scored on the nomination front, our editors also sat together to pick their favorite stories from 2014. And here is what they came up with.
Humblefool - Apart from being one of the most read stories on our site this year, this story was also the most read in our Techie Tuesdays history. Harsha Suryanarayana was the best competitive coder from India. He was hit by a car while crossing the road on 15th June this year. Fondly known as Lord Harsha by his friends, he never worked for any corporate company and made a living by winning programming contests. His sense of ethics and judgment was worth taking note of. 'According to Animesh, even in the exams, he used to finish the paper in half the time and leave the exam hall, but if he didn’t know the answers, he would hand over a blank paper and leave. He never ever downloaded a movie on torrent. When ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ was released, he waited for the DVD to come out.'
Kailash Nadh - Kailash Nadh is the Chief Technology Officer at Zerodha Trading. Born in Allahabad, Kailash got deeply interested in science when he was just eight years old and started building mechanical robots and tinkering with electronic circuits. Soon his dad got transferred to his native state Kerala. It was here that his education in computers begun. Starting with Windows 98, Kailash learned to program in QBasic and soon got addicted to his new-found home. As time passed, he started spending upto 14 hours in front of the PC and learned to program in C and Perl. Although there was a side effect of his learning and his grades went down. Kailash was in his seventh grade when he started taking freelance projects via scriptlance. He did his first project for $5, it was about writing a Perl script for someone. Once he took up a project for an insurance company to design and maintain forms and was paid $99 for it. He says, “My mom was shocked when she saw the $99 cheque from the US.”
Nearly every product developed by him had over 100K users and this is what makes him special.
Kenneth Reitz - Kenneth Reitz built the Requests module in Python when he was just 22 yrs old. Today it has over 18 million downloads and more than 300 contributors to the project. And helping almost every python programmer connect to web services via HTTP. All this with a few lines code written within a mere two hours.
Most people who have made a dent in the programming world are in their 40s and 50s. Kenneth is an the exception to the rule. And did we tell you Kenneth has a special love for India too?