JAY JOSHI
Today, the use of mobile phones is increasing like never before, and people want everything at their fingertips at just one click.this has led to a surge in market for mobile apps rather than computer programming, says Mugdha Khatavkar, a young app developer who is currently pursuing final year of computer engineering at the Goa College of Engineering, Farmagudi. “ There is a lot of opportunity in mobile app-building, and it is also a very easy thing to do. Also, I feel I can implement my ideas in a better way through this medium”
Apart from her interest and skill in programming, what sets Mugdha apart from the rest is her efforts to give back to the community, and the fact that these efforts were recognised by Google, which featured the young programmer in a special video as a part of Google Developers.
When participating in ACM’s first National level Women’s Hackathon, Mughdha faced difficulties in building a team as she couldn’t find enough female programmers. This eventually prompted her to found ‘Code Bae’ a Youtube channel dedicated to teaching Android programming to students.
“When we started building an app as a part of our college internship, our juniors got curious about learning Android. So, we started with the Youtube channel,” informs Mugdha. “What happens is that we teach them various topics in Android over the weekends and they can ask us their queries during the weekdays.”. Today, the channel has over 1000 subscribers.
“It so happened that a Google developer from Bangalore noticed our Youtube channel, and she always puts up Monday Motivation posts focusing especially on women who contribute to the community. She decided to feature me in one of her Monday Motivation videos.” says Mugdha “I was very happy being featured by Google!”
Mugdha recognises that attending various conferences and events related to programming would help boost her knowledge, but that must wait for now. “These conferences take place during the time of exams, and you have to register two months in advance in order to participate in them. It is difficult to attend these events while trying to balance academics”
Mugdha and her team are currently working on building an attendance module for their college, and the young programmer is in search of another brilliant idea to build a good app. Elaborating on how she generates ideas, she says that the roots of new ideas lie in problems that we encounter. “We have had people walk up to us asking to solve their problems. Even the idea for the attendance module came when we saw teachers having difficulty with maintaining attendance.” Mugdha quips “Right now, we have had students too saying that they want something along similar lines, and we are also considering the idea.”
In today’s day and age, programming holds the key to leading innovation. It is seen as a ‘cool’ skill to possess, and a number people from non-technical backgrounds would be interested in learning it. Mugdha says that she also reaches out to such people. “We have an initiative that teaches android basics, starting from scratch,” says the programmer “We start by teaching how to install Android Studio and take a project ahead.”
Even though she is currently busy with work, Mugdha is open to the idea of holding talks and workshops to promote learning of programming in the near future.
