Inspiration
Meet the sensation of the tech world, 12-year-old software developer
12-year-old Tanmay Bakshi is the face of the new generation of coders who cannot wait to debut in the tech world. He has numerous apps under his belt and is well versed in most coding languages in use today.
“The world needs more developers,” when you hear these words you can almost imagine the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a leading software company reeling of this answer in an interview. Only these words are coming from the mouth of a 12-year-old software developer and entrepreneur, Tanmay Bakshi. Bakshi was asserting this in an interview given during IBM InterConnect 2016.
While his poise is enviable for a person of any age, the fact is that Bakshi has only been developing for 3 years now. In his short but remarkable career so far, he has created a wide-range of helpful apps for college students, making the tech world stand up and take notice of his talent. Bakshi developed his first app at the tender age of 9. Since then, he has been developing more apps at an increasing rate keeping pace with his speed of acquiring new programming languages. (Bakshi is fluent in most if not all of the major codes in use today).
The boy wonder is not only juggling his studies and app development, but also has managed his time to create and upload over 80 how-to solution videos on his YouTube channel, ‘Tanmay Teaches’.
Bakshi is currently working on getting the Apple Watch to work independently from the iPhone, developing a few apps for iOSX and an app to help college students and developers look up algorithms. With eloquence that is rare for a person his age, Bakshi discussed the intricacies of AI in the future, explaining that natural human language is a far-fetched short-term goal as “computers’ natural language is math,” not words. However, he holds hope for a “really powerful answering system” in “many years” with “100 percent accuracy.”
His most recent project has been creating a simple answering app using both Watson and Bluemix. The app answers questions like, e.g.: “Who is the CEO of IBM?” Bakshi presented it at the IBM InterConnect 2016, and due to this collaboration, a representative from IBM, James Arcieri, cloud advisor at IBM, was present during the interview.
Other notable accomplishments include developing “Speak for the Handicapped,” an app that literally speaks for those who cannot and was developed in collaboration with one of his YouTube viewers, Ron Clemens. In addition, Bakshi is working on his first book on coding with Swift and the possibilities if it is used with programs like Watson.
While parting, he advices aspiring coders and developers to “use the Internet.” Bakshi’s hugely successful YouTube channel, ‘Tanmay Teaches’ is only one of many resources available to learn coding and other skills for free.
“Start out slow … with a simple app,” he said. Bakshi also cautioned against developing with you “need to develop. Develop because you want to.” While Bakshi may credit his father, a developer, with getting him started, it is quite clear that we all will be seeing more of this Canadian prodigy.