Hi, Minko, please tell our readers who you are and what you do?

My name is Minko Gechev. Currently, I'm dividing my time between San Francisco, California, and Sofia, Bulgaria.

I'm working as a senior developer programs engineer in the Angular team at Google. This position is a mixture between a software engineer and a developer advocate. It allows me to talk to hundreds of developers who're using Angular and work with our engineering team on improving the development experience of the framework and the tooling we provide.

Previously I co-founded Rhyme.com, which recently got acquired by Coursera. My main focus for the past few years has been building tools for developers. When my primary focus was working on Rhyme, in my spare time, I developed different tools for static code analysis of Angular and Go projects.

I read that you got introduced to web development in 2007, and just a few weeks after, you created your first website for the TV show "Perfect Strangers." What made you start programming, and when was the moment you knew you wanted to become a developer?

I've always been fascinated by computers, but I did not believe that "mortals" can write software for them. This perception changed when I got in high school. I was in a class specializing in mathematics and computer science.

When I was 14, I wrote my first program in Pascal. Later, my teacher, Svilen Dimitrov, showed me how I could build websites with PHP and JavaScript. Before that, I was spending hours on my computer playing Diablo and Heroes of Might and Magic. Once I got started with programming games...