Who inspired me to become a developer?

In December of 2014, I was far away from home. I remember sitting on the balcony of a guesthouse in Siem Reap, Cambodia with Ashley (we’ve been together since my sophomore year at Berkeley) and our friend Sherif (a friend from college who we decided to meet with during our route around Southeast Asia).

Our new friend Sohail was also with us at the time, and he was Sherif’s travel buddy for the month. I’ll focus on him a little more in this post because he’s one of my most crucial influencers in pursuing web development.

Initially, Ash and I met with Sherif and Sohail in Bangkok earlier in the month, towards the beginning of our trip. We visited the Grand Palace of Thailand and even went on a day trip by boat to stop by two islands off the coast near Pattaya. We had an awesome time together, which is why we decided to meet again in Cambodia to explore Angkor Wat, the 7th wonder of the world.

Back at the guesthouse, we decided to head inside because it was blistering hot outside, even though it was the winter season. Sohail suggested we listen to Serial, a popular podcast at the time. We were intrigued by the story of Anan Syed, and especially the voice of Sarah Koenig. We agreed that podcasts are a highly underrated medium of content distribution.

I asked Sohail what he was working on, because he mentioned before that he was into iOS mobile application development. In college, I was highly addicted to mobile games like Angry Birds, Temple Run and plenty more games that often times made my breaks from studying longer than they should have been.

Sohail pulled out his phone and handed it to me after opening his app, Style Hunt (he described it as a Tinder style, recommendation based shopping app for clothes). I was fascinated that he was able to build this app on his own. When I input my description and clothing preferences, the app displayed articles of clothing for me to swipe left or right, depending if I liked it or not.

When I asked Sohail how he learned to make this, he said it started with his brother’s suggestion to learn web development (his brother is a developer himself). It was that moment, when Sohail said, “Kyle, you should consider this type of work. If you make the time, you can teach yourself. I can honestly say, I love what I do, and if you have the ambition for it, you’ll learn to love it too.”

That was my first moment of inspiration. In Cambodia of all places. Chatting with Sohail, who I barely knew at the time. Hearing about how I was in control of my future in developing applications. It was the start of my expedition to scout resources online and begin my first project.