Educative Technical Writing Workshop Summer 2022 Winners
What is Educative Answers?
Educative Answers is a free web encyclopedia written by developers for developers. Developers from all over look to Educative Answers to answer their questions because Answers are reviewed, trusted, and provide executable code. We believe that learning is a continual process and our community is eager to level up their technical skills.
The Educative Technical Writing Workshop is a 4-week self-lead workshop that supports developers as they work to develop their soft skills. At Educative Answers, we run public workshops every season. Over the course of 4-weeks, participants write an article, undergo an intensive review process, and get their articles published. We want to empower developers by helping them fine-tune their writing and editing skills so that they can bring those skills into their careers.
Once all articles are published, every participant is encouraged to share their articles on social media and within their communities. The top three Answers with the highest number of views are selected as our winners.
We interviewed each of our winners to learn about their diverse paths into coding that led them all to the same place: Educative Answers. Please read below to learn about our talented winners from this Summer's public workshop!
Humaira Fasih Ahmed
Humaira Fasih Ahmed began coding in 2020 when the COVID pandemic hit Pakistan severely. Due to this, she had the time to focus on herself and explore new opportunities. It was also the same year she had graduated from high school and was preparing to apply to universities. Humaira chose CS50 by HarvardX as an introductory course in Computer Science since she had some exposure to programming from designing a robot in a local science competition. She didn't even know the basics when she started, but due to quarantine, she had an abundance of time to work on learning. The course allowed her to appreciate CS more. Before learning to code, Humaira had a good foundation and understanding of how problem-solving works in a low-level programming language.
Ever since she first learned to code, Humaira loves building logic and algorithms as a part of her courses at LUMS. She also practices LeetCode in her spare time. This technical writing workshop was her first stab at technical writing. She intended to write an article on Medium, but needed an extra push. This workshop came at the perfect time for Humaira because it pushed her to take a leap into technical writing with some guidance from the Answers team.
"I plan to write as an Answers contributor since I love the quick and supportive review process for the article and the professional way the publication was handled."
Looking toward the future, Humaira's interests lie in writing and software systems. She aspires to be an Algorithm or Software Engineer while pursuing technical writing to consolidate her learning path to help other developers.
Please take a look at Humaira's first-place winning Answer!
Anjana Shankar
Anjana Shankar has been an Answers contributor since 2020. Currently, she is a Lead Distributed Systems Developer at Salesforce. She took up Computer Engineering as her bachelor's degree and learned to code as a part of her curriculum. Anjana began coding in C and then moved on to other languages and technologies as a part of her studies.
Technical writing has enabled Anjana to reach out to a massive community that helped her grow into the developer she is today. Through her writing, she has been able to give back to this community. As Anjana plans for the future, she hopes to grow as a technical leader and become known for her hard work.
"I like that coding brings people from different backgrounds together. Unlike documentations, there is no scope of misinterpretation or misrepresentation in the code."
Take a sneak peek at Anjana's second-place Answer.
Pranava Swaroop Balugari
Pranava Swaroop Balugari is a Lead Software Engineer at Beamtree and a new Educative Answers contributor. He worked as a support engineer for over 5 years before he became a software developer. As a support engineer, he was involved in discussions to solve customers’ issues. This experience naturally pulled him towards being a developer. He started out slowly learning Ruby. Shortly after he began learning to code, he resigned from his position as a support engineer and enrolled in a workshop in Sydney, Australia to learn to program.
"I just love the thought process and mental ability involved to solve a problem."
Over the years he has been inconsistent with technical writing. Pranava used to write on Medium and Dev.to, but stopped after about 10 articles. The Educative Technical Writing Workshop reignited his curiosity about writing.
Going forward, Pranava is working towards building his knowledge to achieve scalable solutions.
Check out Pranava's third-place Answer here!
Interested in learning more about Educative Answers and our talented community? Head to our landing page here!
