Mumbai techie, who once lived in slums, earned Rs 5000 per month, reveals how he landed job in Germany in viral post: ‘How it started…’

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Once upon a time, Santosh Yadav used to live in the slums of Mumbai, earning a meagre sum of just Rs 5,000 per month. Today, he has a cushy job and lives in Germany. The techie went viral when he shared before-and-after pictures with his wife. Sharing a heartfelt post on X, formerly known as Twitter, he uploaded two photographs that captured moments from different stages of his life. The first image dates back to 2012 and was taken at their residence in Mumbai, while the second was a recent photograph taken in Hamburg in 2026 as the couple celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary.In his blog, Yadav shared his journey. He revealed he had lived in a slum in Mumbai for 29 years. The Mumbai University graduate also revealed how he struggled with English and initially performed poorly in his BTech degree. However, he refused to give up, focused on his studies and was able to score decent marks on the final exam of his diploma course.By the time he was studying his BTech degree, his family finances had dwindled. However, he persevered and graduated with good grades. However, his struggle was far from over. Then came the Great Recession of 2008. He had a love for coding and managed to get a job that paid Rs 5000 per month.“After 8 months, I decided to leave that job and was jobless for a month. I got some support work for the next 4 months, which required some knowledge of SQL queries, so I brushed up on that knowledge.Finally, in January 2010, I got a job where I could write some code. It was a Windows application using C#. I gave my best, but the salary was still very low…” he wrote on his blog.He then went on to land a job that paid Rs 12,000 per month and then joined a startup where the pay was good and he received more than 50% raise.A major breakthrough came in 2019 when he started actively contributing to prominent open-source projects, including Angular and NgRx. His contributions earned widespread recognition, and later that year he was named a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for Angular. Building on this achievement, Yadav reached another significant milestone in 2020 when he became India’s first GitHub Star, highlighting his influence and impact within the global developer community.Today, Jadav works as Principal Developer Advocate at a Germany-based company called CodeRabbit.