A Mumbai-born software professional's inspiring journey from living in a slum to now working in Germany has captured the attention of people on the internet. Santosh Yadav shared two photographs on X, showcasing how far he has come in life.
The first picture was taken in 2012 at his home in a Mumbai slum, while the second was clicked in Hamburg, Germany, in 2026, as he marked his 17th wedding anniversary with his wife.
“How it started. How it's going. 2012 Vs 2026,” the post read.
Along with the then-and-now pictures, Yadav also shared his life story in the form of a blog, where he revealed that he spent 29 years living in a slum and faced several challenges while growing up. “I was born in Mumbai and lived in a slum as long as I can remember,” he said. “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.”
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Yadav, who used to be a cricket enthusiast, performed terribly in his Class 10th exams, which meant he could not take the science stream for his higher studies. Luckily, one of his father's friends suggested that he take up a diploma course in computer science. While pursuing the course, he said that he struggled with English but eventually improved.
Despite financial difficulties, Yadav decided to get a degree from Mumbai University. He continued working hard and completed his BTech degree with good marks. Finding a job was not easy, especially during the global financial crisis in 2008. Passionate about coding, he landed his first job with a monthly salary of just Rs 5,000.
“After 8 months, I decided to leave that job and was jobless for a month. I got some support work for the next 4 months, which required some knowledge of SQL queries, so I brushed up on that knowledge,” he wrote.
“Finally, in January 2010, I got a job where I could write some code. It was a Windows application using C#. I gave my best, but the salary was still very low.”
He went through several job changes in the following decade. A major turning point came in 2019 when he started contributing to popular open-source projects such as Angular and NgRx. His work led him to be named a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for Angular.
In 2020, Yadav became India's first GitHub Star, another major achievement in his career. Today, he works as a Principal Developer Advocate at CodeRabbit in Germany.
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