Strong foundation for their future

My name is Suthahar Jegatheesan. Since 2007 I've helped students find their footing in technology, and not one of them has ever paid me for it. This page explains why I do it and what you can ask me for. Most of it now runs through the MSDEVBUILD community.

Why I mentor students for free

Plenty of students in India grow up in homes with no spare money. Their parents keep them in school anyway, and it costs those parents something real. Then the degree arrives and the job doesn't. I've sat with students who were ready to walk away from all of it at exactly that point.

I recognise it because it was mine. We were poor. My parents put whatever they had into my schooling. I finished college in Coimbatore in 2007 and then spent months getting nowhere. The job I eventually landed paid just enough for food and a rented room.

That year gave me the thing I still tell students first: a small salary is not your problem, having nothing to build on is. Once that clicked, I started giving my evenings to students who were standing where I had stood. A lot of them have solid lives now. I'm still at it, mentoring college students who are learning to program, talking a few of them back from very dark places, and getting a message a year later saying they got the job. The longer version of my own story is on my About page.

"I've given my time to their careers, not to money. And I've watched lives change and families find happiness because of it."

Suthahar Jegatheesan

Where the mentoring happens now: the MSDEVBUILD community

For years this was one student at a time, on a phone call or over a coffee. That doesn't scale, and the questions kept repeating. So I started writing the answers down instead of saying them once, and MSDEVBUILD grew out of that.

It's free, it's for students and developers who want to build software that actually ships, and this is what's inside:

• Articles and tutorialsWalkthroughs on .NET, C#, .NET MAUI and Flutter, pitched at the person who is actually typing the code.
• Cloud and Azure AIAzure fundamentals, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search over your own documents, and agents that survive contact with real users.
• Short videosOne idea per clip, around 30 seconds, for the things that are quicker to watch than to read.
• Real project codeWhole apps you can clone and break, not snippets that fall apart the moment you change something.
• Direct answersSend a question, get an answer from me. No bot sitting in the middle.
• Certification pathsWhich Microsoft certification earns its place on a student CV, and which one can wait a year.

The community is what lets me mentor at any scale. One student asks, the answer gets written once, and a few thousand students find it later. It stays free.

He was 12: Suhail's journey from 8th grade to CEO

One student comes up every time I tell this story. He had just finished 8th grade and told me he wanted to learn programming. His name is Suhail, and he was 12 years old.

• Age 12. Out of 8th grade, writing his first lines of code.
• Age 14. Accepted into a Master's in Computer Applications programme.
• Along the way. A stack of Microsoft certifications, and software and web work noticed by people like Bill Gates and Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam.
• Today. Two PhDs, and two AI product companies of his own.

Let me say this plainly: none of that is my doing. I was a small part of one early stretch of it. The work and the ambition were his.

A promise of hope

A number is not a finish line. I'll keep doing this for as long as I'm around. Most people measure the years in months and birthdays. I measure them in students who came out the other side with a real career.

Money tends to stay where money already is. That doesn't sentence you to anything. If you grew up without it, you already know how to go without and keep going, and that is harder to teach than code. So decide what you want your life to look like, and start.

A national newspaper heard about this work and ran my story after seeing what it had done for students. More than 15,000 students since 2007, and plenty of them have rebuilt their own lives with it. The Hindu gave the piece a headline I've never forgotten.

"Nobody in this world is useless. Everybody has a talent. Too many people chase only money and end up in the wrong place. Remember, your time is limited. Rethink your priorities."

Suthahar Jegatheesan

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