How an amateur WordPress developer became a professional SDE at a tech startup today.

“I can’t deny the fact that everything I am doing right now at my job today is a direct result of whatever I learnt at Masai School. I did not have to learn any new framework apart from my course curriculum.”

- Shreyas Shriyan, SDE at DROR Labs (Masai Alumnus)

24-year-old Shreyas Shriyan hails from Karnataka. Calling himself a big time Science enthusiast, Shreyas says he had hung out with science nerds since his early childhood, and was busy doing plenty of science experiments and projects. He claims to have built minimalistic home automation systems and audio speakers when he was little.

While growing up, he was naturally inclined to become an engineer after his education. With this interest, he chose Electronics in his high school but ended up watching a lot of automobile videos and Formula One during the time. When it was time for him to choose an engineering branch, Shreyas picked automobile engineering to further expand his curiosity.

But eventually, he lost touch with cars and once stumbled upon how a single line of software code changed certain odds in his favour, on an open-source website. Fascinated by how a tiny script of code could turn things around on the internet, Shreyas started to pick up his programming skills with some basic languages.

He even went on to take on some freelance projects to build websites for different clients. However, he was only using WordPress and drag-and-drop page builders for the same and quickly realised that he needed more skills, if he had to become a serious software developer.

Watch Shreyas talk about his Masai journey in the video below-

Enter Masai School

Calling it a ‘double bonus’ because he would not only learn whatever he really wanted to, but also get placed at a tech company after the course at Masai School. He came across an internet ad about Masai, and learnt that he did not have to pay any upfront fee for this kind of education.

To reduce the burden of student loans for engineering students, Masai School operates on an Income Sharing Agreement (ISA) where the students pay zero upfront cost. Once they graduate from the course, the students will pay back 15 percent of their monthly income for 36 months, or until they reach a maximum capped amount of INR 3 lac.

However, the Income-Sharing Agreement is applicable only when the students get a job offer with a package of INR 5 LPA or more.

At Masai School, Shreyas chose the Full-Stack Web Development Course. He quickly got his hands on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the MERN Stack.

“The 9–9–6 training schedule totally turned my life around. I was a lazy student before I joined the school, but I got to learn how much I could achieve if I am able to carefully structure my days into different compartments and fulfil my daily objectives. Time management has now become my biggest personal strength today.”

Shreyas goes on to add that his best experience throughout his entire curriculum was when he had to work in teams to build projects. The feeling of collaborating with other peers to execute something was a magical one, according to Shreyas.

This experience of working together in teams also added on to his skills as a professional communicator with his workplace colleagues and seniors at DROR Labs. Having graduated from Masai School in December 2020, he now works as a software development engineer (SDE) at the tech startup.