[Techie Tuesday] Bhashkar Sharma, Who Turned Programmer Inspired by Harry Potter

How many freshers you know have joined a startup right out of college? Given the current education system, for a fresher to be ready for the fast paced needs of startup needs sometime and atleast a few years of work experience. But if you thought getting in was difficult, keeping up with the startup’s pace and cementing a place for yourself in a performance driven environment is a lot more difficult.

But our Techie Tuesday today is all too familiar and also comfortable being a startup employee. Bhashkar Sharma is one of MobStac’s first engineers, who joined the company straight out of college and has stayed with the company to become a core platform engineer. Bhashkar and the CTO of MobStac pretty much do the same thing, the only difference being, Bhashkar is a fresher, while the CTO has over 20 years of coding experience.

Meet Bhashkar Sharma, MobStac’s superstar front end coder -- a core platform engineer who which helps content websites adapt to mobile and other portable form factors.

A basilisk and the passion

Back in 2002, when the second book of the Harry Potter series was released as a movie, the giant snake (the basilisk) caught Bhashkar’s imagination. He says, “The animation was so lifelike and I wanted to be able to create animations like that.”

This led Bhashkar’s interest in programming with Flash. He says, “I started coding with Flash much before college and I used to make small movies and presentation. But as you know, you will find Flash in almost every other webpage and that led me to learn web technologies, such as HTML, CSS and JS -- none of which were the core focus languages at college.”

By the end of college, Bashkar was proficient in web technologies and had already landed a job with IT giant Infosys.

At a startup, smaller is better

Bhashkar shared that he never wanted to join a corporate. He says, “Working in a 1000 member organization, you are just a cog in the wheel and your work will never see the light of day.”

Bhashkar went on to land another job with a Mumbai based startup, which was a 200 member organization. “Round about this time, one of my college seniors introduced me to Ravi (Pratap), Founder and CTO of MobStac, who was starting up a company. The idea of being a part of a core team really excited me and I joined them, and have been with them ever since.”

“Now when someone asks me what I do, I can pick out my phone and show them. Now this is something I would have never got at a corporate.”

Too much emphasis on marks

Bhashkar was with the MobStac team at the Startup Jobs Fair, and I asked him what he found missing in today’s freshers. He says, “There’s too much emphasis on marks and the ability to perform well in exams. As a company we are looking to hire guys who can code and unfortunately we don’t find that in freshers today. Very few people can code well straight out of college.” He further adds that it was his interest in Flash helped him discover and learn coding.

Who knows, there is a Bhashkar sitting inside every college in India and by nurturing their interests, we might produce many more startup superstars.

Bhashkar can be reached out at [email protected].