How A Metallurgist ended up in Software Development ??

In 2017, a group of Cummins College students approached me. They were gearing up for the very first Smart India Hackathon and wanted me to mentor their team.

During our chat, I casually mentioned that I had zero formal education in programming and that my degree was in Metallurgy.

I still remember their expressions. 🙂

For context:

I graduated in Metallurgy from COEP and completed my post‑graduation in Materials Science from IIT Powai. I don’t hold a single certificate in computer science. Naturally, people often ask—then how did you end up in software?

The story goes back to 1984.

I was in 8th standard. My friend Sandeep Shiyekar’s father, a professor at Walchand College in Sangli, had access to a newly arrived computer (most likely a BBC Micro). He invited a few of us to see it and offered to teach programming if we were interested.

None of us had a computer at home, so we learned BASIC on a blackboard every Sunday.

Yes—actual programming, written in chalk.

During the school vacation, I visited my cousin Shirish Ranade. He had a Commodore 64 and a Casio PB‑100. That was it—I was hooked. With no YouTube or internet, I learned purely from books and manuals. Read. Experiment. Repeat.

Shirish gave me the PB‑100, and for the next few years I kept pushing its limits. It had just 1 KB of memory, so every program had to fit inside that tiny space. That constraint taught me more about logic and efficiency than any course ever could.

Engineering years: the real acceleration

In my first year of engineering, . I discovered Turbo C and the book “Spirit of C”. I didn’t have a computer, so I wrote programs in a notebook and exchanged ideas with my friend Jayant Walvekar through handwritten letters. Occasionally I went to Shirish's place in Thane and tried out my ideas on his IBM PCs

By second year, thanks to my friend Janmejay Nemade, I got permission to use the computers in the Metallurgy department. By then, programming felt natural. I even completed my BE project in Turbo C—building an “optimum mix” solver for cast‑iron furnace materials to minimize cost. This was 5000 line Turbo C program. Probably a record in COEP at that time.

Published on linkedin on 7th April 2026