Teen techie shows an idea can change life

Some 38 developers got together to create BlackBerry Messenger-related applications at the Hackathon-2012 here on Saturday. Among them was 14-year-old Raghav Sood, whose multi-player chess game won him one of the five prizes for the best idea. Deevakar Anand reports.

Some 38 developers got together to create BlackBerry Messenger-related applications at the Hackathon-2012 here on Saturday. Among them was 14-year-old Raghav Sood, whose multi-player chess game won him one of the five prizes for the best idea.

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Meet one of the city’s young prodigies.

A Class 10 student of The Shri Ram School, Moulsari, Sood has 15 applications in the Android market with the name of Appaholics to his credit. He is currently writing a book ‘Pro Android Augmented Reality,’ to be published on April 30 this year. A regular in online mobile application development communities, Sood started programming at the age of nine.

“For the first two years, I was doing web development. Later, I started developing desktop applications. Towards the end of 2010, I wrote my own operating system in pure x86 assembly, the lowest of the programming languages,” he said. Sood got his first smartphone, an Android-powered LG Optimus in February 2011.

A week later, he wrote his first and most basic Android application. After working with Android for several months, he registered for a developer account on the Android Market in September last year. “Towards the end of 2011, a US-based publishing group “Apress” contacted me to be a tech reviewer for one of their books. That didn’t happen, but they asked me to write a book for them instead. I accepted the offer,” he said.

His father, Atul Sood, a senior IT professional, said, “Raghav’s interests include science and photography.”