Code decode: Newer challenges for professional coders

Piyush Mishra, 30, started programming when he was 16. An IIT graduate who had moved back to his hometown in Balasore, Odisha, taught young Mishra the basics of coding. Gradually, Mishra, who studied in a government school in Balasore, mastered PHP, Flash and HTML, and started coding for local entities — a cricket scoreboard for a local news channel’s website, sites for local businesses and so on. The big break came when Mishra got into the Google Summer of Code programme, which paid $5,000 for three months in 2011. Freelancing followed, mainly for Europe and US-based companies at $20-25 per hour. “99% of them were startups. All the things you discover in a company I discovered on my own,” recalls Mishra, now proficient in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Go and Python.