This one was special for me.
In Programmable Episode #6, I got to speak with Gokul Chandrasekaran, the founder and CEO of JDoodle.
Gokul spoke about how to make tough career decisions, why he built JDoodle, the frustration of wasted time as a software dev, and his favourite developer job ever.
Read on to find out more, or listen to the full episode.
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Why Gokul built JDoodle
Gokul was driven to build an online IDE from his own experience: his frustration of being a University student without access to his own personal computer.
Growing up in a rural middle class family in India, every time he wanted to code he had to go to the learning centre, book a PC, and spend half his allotted time to install Java. It was an uphill battle:
Dial-up internet.
CDs with Java 1.2
Hours of frustration.
The memory of this drove Gokul to spend a weekend writing a single web application in 2011, to take a snippet of a user’s Java code and execute it.
During a quieter period at work, he put it online in 2013: “My investment was $20. I bought a server for $20. And I put some Google Ads.”
And Gokul was surprised that in the first month, his one-page Java experiment earned more than $20. The site began to grow organically without any advertisements and people began to ask for additional features.
When people wanted to integrate IDEs into their platform and APIs, that’s when he decided to resign his full-time job and take JDoodle as a serious full time project.
Tiny startup vs a giant corporation: where should you work?
Gokul started his career in a tiny startup. Working from a dingy cafe basement, he shipped products and learned to do everything related to software development.
Working in a small startup gives you opportunities to touch every aspect of work, building everything from scratch.
He found that in big companies, you are just a cog in the machine. This can be a good fit for those who are happy being a full-time employee and enjoying their retirement. For those with dreams of building something, startups are a great place to start building.
He worked for 20 years spanning roles as a software developer, team lead, solutions architect, enterprise architect, and management consultant. His last role was with KPMG as an associate director. He worked in various cities like Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Germany and Singapore, and finally moved to Australia in 2010.
He said “from a career perspective, it actually helped me see different projects, different clients, different technologies that actually helped me shape my career.”
I took a 40% pay cut: how to make tough career decisions
Gokul planned his career very carefully.
Solutions or enterprise architect is a prestigious role for a technologist, and transitioning from software developer wasn’t an easy leap. Despite being a top-performing developer, he had to switch companies, and relocate. He also took a significant pay cut to move into architecture. But according to him these moves were essential to gain the experience he needed.
“Nothing happens in the world in the short term. If something happens in the short term, it’s not going to be permanent, number one. And if something comes to you without you looking for it, most of the time people will lose it.”
What’s the difference between a software developer and a solutions architect?
Solutions architecture and enterprise architecture act as bridges between business needs and technical execution.
Software developers solve technical problems. How efficiently can we deliver bug free code? How can we ensure performance? But transitioning to a solutions architect shifts the focus in understanding and translating business requirements into technical solutions.
For Gokul, this means understanding that technology exists to support the business, not the other way around.
Being a successful architect means balancing the demands of both business and engineering teams, often needing to convince developers who are usually highly opinionated, about the best possible approach.
His strong technical background as a developer helped him to earn confidence from the engineering team in his proposed technical solutions.
End up in an architectural role by chance? You still need to continuously upskill and understand the technical aspects to be successful in the role.
Gokul believes that technical leaders and managers should never be only focused on management. If you cannot do a particular job, you should not manage it:
“I think it was in Tesla, if I remember correctly. Elon Musk said every manager should be doing the work, actual work at least 20% of the time. I would say you should be doing it at least 50% of the time."
"Those were my great days”: life as a software developer
Gokul really enjoyed his days as a software developer:
“Coding is like meditation to me. Those were my great days.”
In his earlier days as a developer, Gokul was working on an eBay-style bidding platform for an Australian auction company. They had physical walls for Agile stories, with cards moving from “to-do” to “in progress” and finally “done.”
The days were simple, clear, and incredibly satisfying. Every day, he would leave the office feeling fulfilled, having spent the day working in a flow state.
But Gokul has also worked in environments which were chaotic, with tight deadlines and extreme levels of expectations. In situations like this he found the key was to understand the business needs and effectively communicate with the managers.
The surprise element in JDoodle:
JDoodle was built for software developers, but to Gokul’s surprise, the platform quickly became popular among students and educators.
In retrospect, this makes sense. A developer may spend 15 minutes troubleshooting their development environment. With 30 students, a teacher may spend the whole first week of class helping students get set up.
Because JDoodle removes this barrier, teachers and students grew to love it as a no-setup IDE.
Heartfelt messages from users who thanked him for creating a platform accessible on mobile phones, especially for those who couldn’t afford laptops, were a very nice surprise for Gokul.
Is AI a threat to developer jobs?
Though some see AI as a threat to jobs or to junior software developer roles, Gokul views this as a much needed change.
Like many, he pursued computer science because he enjoys making things efficient.
So when he discovered huge inefficiencies in the software development process,he made it his mission to fix this. JDoodle’s mission is to help developers spend 100% of their time coding instead of other tasks like setting up the environment.
AI can drastically reduce wasted effort and allow developers to focus on their core job role. Gokul firmly believes that AI will help development teams do more with less.
In the future, JDoodle will allow developers to focus on the actual coding: with just a click, developers can deploy and host their software directly from JDoodle.
How to pick your tech stack: what technical skills are in demand?
There’s no quick answer to this.
Gokul suggests first identifying the kinds of problems you want to solve. Then, pick a focus: Would you rather make front-end applications, middleware, or work on complex back-end or infrastructure elements?
He spent much of JDoodle’s life working solo. One thing that helped him is a tendency to always underestimate the time and difficulty of a project: he sees this as both an advantage and disadvantage. When asked to build a mobile app for JDoodle, he thought “why not?”
In the end, he spent months learning Flutter and Dart to develop JDoodle’s mobile app, tackling each new technology—like Docker and Kubernetes—through self-study and experimentation. He believes that we just need to throw away the fear of failure. Even if we don’t succeed, the next time is going to be better.
Want to hear more from Gokul? Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. If you want to keep track of Gokul, check out the link below.