Note: This story was later published to Dev.to.

In this feature of A Developer Story, I’ll be interviewing a student named Rohan Kapur. Without further ado, let’s get into it!

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you?

Sure — my name is Rohan Kapur and I was born in Melbourne, Australia. I lived there for about 8 years until I moved to Singapore (as an expat), where I still live at 17 years old. This fall, I’m headed off to the US for college, and expect to stay there for the rest of my life.

How long have you been writing software?

Since 12 years old when I stumbled upon Xcode while playing around with iOS jailbreaking. So around 6 years.

What was your first software project?

Hard to say — I experimented with a lot of different small projects when I began learning, so I don’t exactly recall what my first creation was, but I think my first “main” undertaking was Travelog. I spent around 2–3 years on the whole app; it started as MileIndex and evolved to “Trvlogue” before I settled on “Travelog” for the third iteration of the product. MileIndex, an idea given to me by my father, was a tool for frequent travelers to record their flights and clock miles for taxation purposes. I’m still not an adult so I’m not entirely sure why this is helpful, but my dad cared about it enough to make me want to build it. With Trvlogue, I expanded the feature set to include more information about the places you are traveling to — news, plug sizes, weather, etc.

Still, I wasn’t satisfied; I wanted to build something that looked great (that is, not something clearly made by a teenager) and had social networking features. I didn’t really have justification for including the latter — in fact I didn’t really have many users to get any feedback from — but I really just wanted to learn more. If I’m being perfectly honest, apps that could use backends felt “sexy” to me, as were most things (like game development and machine learning) that I ended up learning throughout middle school and high school.

After a lot of hard work, and a lot of procrastination, I launched version 1 of Travelog to the App Store in 2015. It wasn’t complete, but I was going to burn out for the second time if I didn’t hit that “Submit” button soon. In my opinion, it looked really great and had some very useful features. The social networking feature I included was a request again given by my dad. In particular, he felt it would be super useful if users could sign up with LinkedIn and check out their connections also on Travelog that are going to be in their destination at the same time (so either if they live there or are traveling there) for networking purposes.

We were lucky to receive a feature on the App Store under the “20 Under 20” (20 apps made by people under 20 years old). You can check it out at travelogapp.com. The app, however, doesn’t work anymore the backend provider I was using at at the time — Parse, I didn’t build my own for Travelog — has since closed shop.

I didn’t necessary build something that many people used, but by iterating and slowly increasing the scope of the projects I was working on at a young age, I learned a metric butt-ton about design, programming, computer science, etc. and found my passion for creating things that was crucial for my later work like Contra (getcontra.com).

Who’s your favorite music artist? Why?

I usually have a different answer for this question every year and a half, heh. I get really obsessed with certain songs and artists at different times. My current phase is Green Day. I used to be in love (think as much as app development) with them at a young age, and with the release of their new album I rekindled this love. I might get to see them live in Oakland this summer, but not 100% sure yet.

As to why they’re my favorite artist, I guess I just love their music; it’s the most pleasurable thing for me to listen at this period of time. Objectively, though, I think they have some of the strongest songwriting and lyrics from any [punk] rock band out there — and I’m not just speaking in the political commentary sense (the lyrics on WARNING are my second favorite!). They put on some of the industry’s best shows, and the group members themselves are cool guys who hold strong opinions that they convey through their work.

I see that you’ve previously won a WWDC Scholarship. How was that experience?

Definitely one of the most important experiences in my middle and high school career. At the time, going to WWDC was my ultimate dream; in fact, check out this note I sent to Steve Jobs back in 2012 about my aching desire to attend, before scholarships opened.

One way I see the last 4–5 years of my life is as a string of failures and successes — as opportunities where I have either lived up to or not lived up to my ambitions. Getting that WWDC scholarship congratulatory email was probably second to my Stanford University acceptance letter last December in that sense.

What did I gain from WWDC? Valuable connections, like Apple execs or an App Store team employee who helped me get my app Contra featured. Friends, like Lenny Khazan, who I talk to and work with on a daily basis even though they live thousands of miles away from me. Exposure to Silicon Valley, where I want to be in the future. Important knowledge from the sessions and labs. And euphoria from the keynote!

Mostly, though, it was just crazy fun. Definitely one of the more high energy weeks of my entire life. I would recommend any young iOS developer to apply.

Would you attend WWDC again?

Hard to say — right now I can’t justify the ticket cost, so if I attend it would be on scholarship. I can’t apply this year, though (and I didn’t really apply for the past 2 years in pursuit of other things eg. internships and exams).

In general, though, I’m not as interested in iOS development as I was a couple years back.

Favorite programming language? Why?

Hmm. I don’t really have an answer to this, mostly because I haven’t given it much thought. I’m actually not a programming geek; I just like to make things, and put my heart and soul into the process. I treat coding as a means to create the thing I need to create, but I’ve never been too curious about the workings of the languages themselves.

I would say Swift is very enjoyable to write in, though.

What are you learning at the moment?

So, aside from school stuff, mostly two things:

1. Right now I’m learning about life satisfaction and value creation. So — good communication strategies, self reflection, goal setting, happiness, relationships, health for the former and effective management, building products, starting companies, solving problems, making money, being an “ultimate CEO”, fulfilling my ambitious, etc. for the latter. I’m reading a lot of books about these things as well. I’m doing this because I believe it will help me fulfill my life ambitions. I’m actually currently taking a course on this by a Stanford graduate, and would highly encourage all high school or middle school students (or beyond) to get involved. You simply have to express your interest on this Reddit post and the Stanford grad will get back to you in a few days.

2. Artificial intelligence is a field I’ve been interested in for about 2 years now. A career in the field — be it through research or through startups/companies — is definitely something I’d be keen to pursue. I’m mostly learning about machine learning and the math and algorithms that compose it, but I’m also interested in the interdisciplinary aspect of AI — how philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and biology all play a part in the development of the field and tie together with computer science. In fact, I’m probably going to take a major at Stanford called Symbolic Systems which deals with exactly this. I write about my findings on AI over at ayearofai.com with my friend Lenny, if you’re interested in following.

I’m also continuing to work on version 2 of Contra when I get free time (in a week or so I basically have 2 months of minimized school work, so it’s go time then). With that though I’m not learning much new — rather I’m just hacking away on already familiar code — but when I launch the new iteration I hope to expand my horizons, given that there’s decent momentum. This means design, marketing, business stuff, etc. etc.

Do you have any advice for beginners in software development?

To succeed, you just have to not give up. After observing many of my friends and acquaintances who have explored programming, it is the people who don’t give up that eventually succeed (even if they suck at it for so long that people think they’re crazy for persevering).

Learn by building things. The best thing you can do is build things where scope grows on an exponential scale. So, for example, my first real app was something like a simple, ugly, dysfunctional calculator. My sixth app was a full-fledged social network. If your projects keep increasing in breadth and/or depth then you will devour more and more information and know about more technologies and become a “learning machine”.

That’s it. I don’t want to overcomplicate it. I believe it’s as easy as these two things.

How can people connect with you (Github, Website, Social Media)?

My personal website is rohankapur.com. The best way to get in touch with me is to shoot an email to me@rohankapur.com. I should respond pretty quickly :)