Gaurav is a self-taught developer who learned to code without a degree. His coding talents led him to leave India and get a job with Shopify in Canada. Read his interview below to learn how he did it!
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Hey, can you introduce yourself?
I'm Gaurav Chande - a self-taught programmer, startup founder, and currently running a tiny AI product lab called 42 Acorns. I live in the Greater Toronto Area in Canada, though I grew up in a small town called Ahmednagar in India.
These days I'm mostly building what I call "toys" – functioning projects I can hand to users and say "Look what I made! Isn't it fun?" The current one is Bookling, a children's storybook creation tool that uses AI to help parents and kids make personalized books together. I also occasionally work hands-on with startups – not just as an advisor, but actually building and shipping things with them.
Why did you learn to code?
Honestly? Boredom and desperation.
I graduated as a Chemical Engineer in India, completely clueless about what I wanted to do in life. I'd tried learning programming twice before, once in high school, and again in university. Both times it was C/C++ basics. I was okay at it, but it felt boring. Writing sorting algorithms just didn't click for me.
Then in mid-2011, I needed to make money. I started learning how to make websites and apps with HTML and PHP. And this – this was different. This was fun. Building real, tangible things with code that I could actually sell to other people? I became obsessed.
The difference was purpose. When I was writing code that solved someone's actual problem and got me paid for it, suddenly programming made sense. It wasn't abstract anymore.
How did you learn coding?
Completely self-taught. No bootcamp, no CS degree. Just a lot of trial and error.
After getting hooked on HTML and PHP, I started freelancing as a web developer back in India. I'd build apps for small businesses, learn what I needed for each project, and repeat. It was messy but effective.
Soon I picked up Ruby and the Rails framework, and there was just no looking back. Ruby felt like it was designed for programmer happiness. The code read almost like English. I was building things faster than I ever had before.
The key was always working on real projects. I'd take on client work that was slightly beyond my current skill level, then figure it out as I went. It was somewhat intimidating, but that's how I learned fastest – by needing to ship something.
I also read a bunch. Technical books like Sandi Metz's "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby" shaped how I think about code. And I'd spend hours reading documentation and blog posts from developers I admired, trying to understand not just how they wrote code, but how they thought about problems.
How did you get your job at Shopify?
This is probably the most unusual hiring story I have.
