Not everyone at the top has had it easy in life. Some have struggled for years, survived on the bare minimum and given their all to be where they are today. One such personality is Santosh Yadav, an Indian-origin man who once lived in a Mumbai chawl and now owns a multi-storey apartment in Germany.His story is going viral on the internet for his sheer grit to not give up in life and continue persevering, even if fate was not working out in his favour. He took to X to share a post featuring before and after photographs with his wife, showing how their lives have changed after 14 years, prompting many to hail the journey behind the transformation.
A difficult start
Yadav shared that he was born in Mumbai and lived in a slum as long as he could remember. “It was a typical slum which you see in movies, there were good people and a lot of bad people, too. I was lucky not to hang out with those bad people for long,” he wrote.In school, he said he was more of a lazy person and cricket was his first love. He performed very poorly in his 10th exams and wasn’t sure what he would do next. He wanted to get admitted to science but his marks were low.One of his father’s friends informed them about the Diploma courses. He chose computer science without thinking twice, despite the fact that he had never worked on a computer before.Growing up studying in a Hindi-medium school, English was never his native language. “I remember crying in a class because I couldn’t understand a thing, and I was scared to fail again like I failed my expectations in 10th standard,” he wrote.When he did not perform well in the internal exams, he realised giving up was not an option this time. He pulled himself back, began studying hard, stopped playing cricket and isolated himself from his friends. “The only thing I wanted to achieve was somehow not to fail in the first year of the 3-year program. In the upcoming exams, I did ok and got around 50% in the first year.” By the end of the final year, he had scored more than 60%.
The first setback
After the diploma, Yadav was even more interested in studying CS as a degree. There was another program he entered into but during the second year, his dad lost his job. “He asked me to start looking for a job as he could not afford to pay the fee for my CS degree which was around 42k (550 USD) per year,’ he shared.He remembered crying the entire night and the next day his mother stood up for him and said: “Do whatever you want to do, but my son is going to continue his studies.” In 2004, he was admitted into the second year of college at Mumbai University. Since he couldn’t afford textbooks, he would buy them from the library. Some of his professors used to borrow books for him so he could study for the exams. By the third year, his family’s conditions had gotten worse but his father had saved up some money and he was able to get the degree.
Entering the job market
Yadav married Upasana in 2007, and the couple continued to face financial hardships. They lived in modest conditions, with rainwater reportedly leaking into their home during the monsoon. He has credited his wife with supporting him through those difficult years.During the Great Recession, he got his first job with a salary of Rs 5,000. In 2010, he got another job coding for a Windows application using C# with a monthly salary of Rs 12,000. Since there was not much work, he brushed up on C# and SQL. In 2011, he joined a startup with a more than 50% raise. He worked there for five years, getting insurance and PF as well.Determined to improve his prospects, he sharpened his coding skills. His work on Angular and NgRx earned him recognition as a Google Developer Expert for Angular in 2019. A year later, he became India’s first GitHub Star.All the while, he tackled repaying loans he took for his daughter’s urgent delivery at the hospital, her school admission and even her TB diagnosis. But Yadav reminded people of two things: never give up, and family is important.
Life in Germany
At 36, he decided to move to Germany for an opportunity with a company and a better life for his family. His daughter had lived in a slum for eight years before they moved out and now he wanted to give her all he could. Today, he works as a Principal Developer Advocate at CodeRabbit, focusing on AI-related developer tools.To celebrate their 17th wedding anniversary, he shared two photographs on X: one taken at the couple’s Mumbai home in 2012 and another in Hamburg in 2026. “How it started. How’s it going,” wrote Yadav in the caption.“At one point we were sleeping on the floor. And when I think about those days, it makes me even stronger. We once had nothing, but we had people who could help. So now, it’s time to support others,” he wrote in an accompanying blog post.
