Nishu Goel: The journey to GDE
Google Developers Experts is a community of passionate developers who love to share their knowledge with others. There are over 150 women in the community. #WomenAreExperts is a series that features their stories and achievements, with an aim to inspire more women to follow their path.
Today, meet Nishu Goel — a Google Developer Expert in Angular, and Microsoft MVP and Engineer at TheDataWorks. Outside of work you can find her reading, writing and browsing the web.
Hi Nishu! Tell me about your journey to becoming a software engineer, and an Angular expert?
As an engineering student, I participated in Nationals Microsoft Imagine Cup twice, and connected with teachers and experts. Their energy and careers inspired me, and I started learning Angular from my mentor, Mr. Dhananjay Kumar. His teaching was very to the point and related to real life scenarios. It didn’t take me long to be able to build websites using the Angular framework. This confidence made me put down what I had learned into blog posts and share that publicly.
After months developing and writing, Mr. Alok, organizer of Nepal’s Angular Conference, invited me to speak at the conference. I grabbed this great opportunity and that’s where my foray into speaking about Angular topics, projects, writing codelabs, started. Writing a book was never on my mind really, but when I spoke at ngIndia 2019, something hit me and I was super curious to be writing my own book on Angular Routing, that being my forte and a topic quite vast in itself.
Meanwhile, I was doing a huge project using Angular at work, which involved dealing with multiple components, web components, libraries etc. I was promoted to the role of Frontend Architect for an education-bot based counseling project. Doing workshops at both work and in the community. I had written more than 50–70 blogs and 2020 was the year of me being awarded as GDE and Microsoft MVP. This was also the year of starting to work on new tech, like React framework, Golang etc. I recently did a complete code/text based course for Angular learning on educative.io. So, that’s how it currently goes, I code using Angular, React, golang etc. and create POCs for Angular examples.
You are incredibly active in the Angular community: you are a developer, an Angular GDE, and a content creator. What keeps you motivated to do all these things?
As a developer, we get to learn something new on a regular basis, and this learning is sometimes super interesting which should be shared with fellow devs. This was the biggest motivation for me to get started, and starting from simply penning down what I learn, it goes to a stage where you actually start delivering better and easy-to-understand content. You do not want to NOT understand what you wrote 5 months or a year ago. As an Angular GDE and a content creator, being able to write something which helped me and is also helping others is THE DOSE needed to keep doing this.
What is your favorite part of giving back to the Angular developer community?
The learning environment, we never know enough you see!
You are passionate about supporting women in tech. Tell us more about it.
Women have a hard time balancing work, life, and choosing to do a third thing, which is working for the community is not an easy decision. I feel proud to see women engaging in activities outside work and so I try to motivate women through my talks at events like Women’s Day in Africa, IWD India, sharing my work on a regular basis as this activity also seems to motivate people quite a lot.
What does it mean to be a Google Developer Expert?
Being a Google Developer Expert, in simple terms, means being technically sound in the tech you are a GDE for, and being able to share it with others, teach them through a variety of mediums, be it written content, video content, code content, delivering a talk. It means somebody who a developer can turn to when stuck with a problem in the hope that the GDE might have tried doing it before.
What advice would you give to a woman considering applying for the GDE program?
Keep sharing what you learn, there is always someone who is going to benefit from our learning and sharing.
If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
Sleep Manipulation
That’s a good one! Thanks for sharing your story Nishu!
Read more stories from our Angular Experts: Tracy Lee, Natalia Venditto & Alyssa Nicoll.
If you are interested in joining the Google Developers Experts program, fill out this interest form.
Check out the latest from the GDE program on Twitter and LinkedIn.
