Draft: From Sales Floor to Senior Dev: Mubarak Awal's Unlikely Path Into Gaming

src/content/blog/mubarak-awal-taught-himself-to-code-on-youtube.md

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+---
+title: "Mubarak Awal Taught Himself to Code on YouTube. Now He Builds for a Canadian Games Studio, From Ghana."
+description: How a self-taught developer with no CS degree went from YouTube tutorials
+  to leading a live-ops team at a Canadian gaming company, remotely from Ghana.
+pubDate: '2026-07-09'
+guest: Mubarak Awal
+guestBio: Senior software developer at a leading live-ops gaming company in Canada,
+  working remotely from Ghana. Self-taught, former Codetrain teaching fellow, backend
+  specialist.
+videoId: svOfJ-OPkEs
+videoUrl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svOfJ-OPkEs
+tags:
+- career
+- software-engineering
+- remote-work
+- interviews
+- self-taught
+heroClip:
+  mp4: /clips/mubarak-awal-taught-himself-to-code-on-youtube.mp4
+  webm: /clips/mubarak-awal-taught-himself-to-code-on-youtube.webm
+  poster: /clips/mubarak-awal-taught-himself-to-code-on-youtube.jpg
+  alt: Mubarak Awal speaking during his Tech Peeps Diaspora interview
+draft: true
+interviewDate: '2022-09-29'
+---
+
+# Mubarak Awal Taught Himself to Code on YouTube. Now He Builds for a Canadian Games Studio, From Ghana.
+
+"I came from a sales background and I went straight into software development, so I didn't have any computer science background." That is the line Mubarak Awal delivers almost as an aside, the way you might mention you took the long way to work. But sit with it for a second. No CS degree. No developer friends. Just eight months of YouTube videos and a stubborn conviction that this was the thing he wanted to do. Today he is a senior software developer at what he describes as "the leading live ops games developer in Canada right now," and he does it all remotely, from Ghana.
+
+If you have ever wondered whether the untraditional route into tech actually leads anywhere, this one is for you.
+
+## Working On the Games, Not In Them
+
+The first thing Mubarak wants to clear up is a small myth. Working in the gaming industry, he says, "isn't the same as playing the games actually, because you are behind the scenes, you are making sure the game is actually working."
+
+He leads the team responsible for the game staying live. That means being permanently on alert. "Whenever you connect to a server and you connect to a game and they tell you the server is down, it's usually our fault," he says, with the kind of honesty that only comes from someone who has fielded those pages at odd hours. "So we have to make sure it's always running."
+
+For all that pressure, he keeps returning to one word: fun. Seeing "how users enjoy the games that you work, you build, the features you add" is the payoff. And the remote setup from Ghana suits him. Four hours ahead of the Canadian team, he starts around 11 in the morning, which leaves the early hours for "all personal stuff that I want to do." Then, as he puts it, "I jump onto work in the afternoon."
+
+## Rewinding to the Beginning: YouTube, Python, and a Book That Wouldn't Cooperate
+
+Since this is a profile, let us rewind, the way any good origin story deserves. Six years ago Mubarak decided he wanted to code. He did not know a single developer. He did not even know Udemy existed. "So it was just YouTube," he recalls, "watching so many YouTube videos, reading a lot of articles, trying to find what to do."
+
+He learned some Python. He tried Ruby on Rails and, in a detail every self-taught dev will feel in their bones, "never got past the setup phase." Errors he could not fix. So Python it stayed.
+
+Eight months in, he hit a familiar wall: he knew the language but had no idea what to build with it. As he memorably puts it, he was "knowing ABCD and not knowing what to do with it." The turning point was meeting his first mentor, Richie, the CEO of Codetrain, who made him understand he had to choose a career path, web, mobile, and commit. Within a few months he had built his first full mobile application, "with the backend and everything working."
+
+## Build the Boring Project
+
+Ask Mubarak what actually made concepts click, and he does not point to a flashy app. He points to the humble, slightly unglamorous e-commerce site and its cousin, the blog.
+
+"It's a very simple project," he says, "but it teaches you a lot about the basics you need to grow faster as a backend developer." A blog with posts, comments, tags, and categories quietly forces you through the entire CRUD process and every relationship type you will ever meet: many-to-many, one-to-many. Push it further with an admin dashboard and you have brushed up against most of the challenges backend work will throw at you.
+
+He is candid about how hard that first attempt was. Sitting with a book, trying to map databases, nothing making sense. "After some time I finally figured it out," he says. On the mobile side, his advice is just as concrete: build something simple that authenticates and consumes an API. Once you can do that, "it becomes like something that you take with you almost like to every single job you go to."
+
+The through-line, and one the host recognized from his own experience, is deceptively simple: it is not enough to learn. You have to build. Building is what surfaces the challenges tutorials never will.
+
+## Junior, Mid, Senior: What Actually Changes
+
+Having later become a teaching fellow at Codetrain, Mubarak has watched a lot of people climb the ladder, so on behalf of every developer squinting at their own job title, the question had to be asked. What really separates the levels?
+
+He starts with the blunt reality: if a stranger has never met you, they guess from years of experience. Roughly, junior is one to two years, mid is three-plus, senior is five or six-plus. But he is quick to note that time is not destiny, and he waves off those infamous listings demanding "10 years experience for a junior developer."
+
+The more useful distinction is expectation:
+
+- **Junior.** The company expects to mentor you heavily but not to handhold. Lots of questions are fine; that is the point.
+- **Mid.** Now you should be "self-manageable," able to take a task and run without bothering a lot of people.
+- **Senior.** It "goes beyond just you and the tasks you're working on." You take on the hard problems, you own technical decisions, and crucially you help the junior and mid developers level up toward where you are.
+
+He adds one grace note that every anxious new hire should tape to their monitor: even seniors get an onboarding window, "a time where you can ask all the dumb questions," before any of this kicks in.
+
+## Promoted in Months: What He Did Differently
+
+Here is where the story gets genuinely instructive. Mubarak was hired as a mid-level developer and promoted to senior within a few months, while others hired around the same time were not. So what did he do?
+
+His answer is almost anticlimactic in how practical it is. First, he over-communicated. With every task, his Scrum Master knew "where I was, what I was working on, where I was going next," and any time something threatened to slip, he flagged it early.
+
+Second, he bothered people. Shamelessly and strategically. Facing a new game, a Java framework he had never used, an unfamiliar system, he hunted down whoever had touched the code before him. "If I was working in a file and I didn't understand anything, I'll just check the commit history, see who was the most recent person who made a commit in this file, hit the person up." That extended to junior devs too; when Unity work landed on his desk, he went straight to the junior who knew Unity.
+
+There is a lovely, human moment buried in here. Feeling slow, he messaged his project manager to apologize for not moving fast enough. The reply: "No, what are you saying? Yeah, you're actually doing good." Sometimes the story we tell ourselves about our own pace is the least reliable one in the room.
+
+## The Weight (and Balance) of Seniority
+
+Moving up meant becoming a stakeholder in multiple projects and leading the game-ops team across time zones. More meetings. More scoping. More of the difficult challenges that, he admits, are "sometimes frustrating, but also interesting because with every difficult challenge you encounter, you get to learn more."
+
+Does it wreck work-life balance? Not really, he says, because it is all planned. The trick is managing your own time: know you have two hours of meetings and six hours to work, and shape your day accordingly. It helps that his team is largely self-managing, so he does little handholding and a lot of collaborative problem-solving.
+
+## Interviewing Is Its Own Career
+
+If there is one idea from this conversation that deserves to be printed on a poster, it is this: "interviewing in tech is a skill on its own." You can know how to code, build beautiful things, and still walk into an interview and stumble, because interviewing is "a whole different career path on its own that you'd have to embark on."
+
+He breaks the landscape into rough tiers: FAANG-level companies, early startups, and everything in between. Across almost all of them you will face a technical interview (data structures and algorithms) and a behavioral round. For mid and senior roles, add system design, which is less about code and more about decisions: which hosting service, how many servers, which database, all in service of a system that can sustain its expected users.
+
+FAANG interviews, he says plainly, "are like, they're crazy, honestly." His pragmatic hack: prepare at FAANG level even if you are aiming lower, and you will walk into a startup interview confident. His prep stack, drawn straight from the transcript, is refreshingly specific:
+
+- A data structures and algorithms course to cover the fundamentals.
+- A patterns course; he name-checks "Blogging the Coding Interview" and its roughly 20 coding patterns.
+- Behavioral prep and mock interviews on a site like pramp.com.
+- System design practice, including mock system design interviews, if you are senior.
+
+And when nerves creep in? "What's the worst thing that can come out of you taking an interview? They reject you," he shrugs. "They can't come to your house."
+
+## When the Rejections Pile Up
+
+The host named the quiet fear a lot of applicants carry: you apply to dozens of jobs, hear nothing back, and start wondering if you are simply not cut out for it. Mubarak has a mantra for exactly that moment.
+
+"One thing I always have at the back of my mind is that it has been done before. Like, I'm not the first person doing it." Whenever results dry up, he goes looking for the article or video from someone who has already cleared the hurdle. That instinct is what led him to discover his own first CV was, in his word, "terrible," which sent him into a course on developer CVs, cover letters, and building a strong LinkedIn presence. Recruiters, he warns, will cross-check your LinkedIn against your CV. That polished CV, he notes, is the one that landed his current role. Usually the fix is small: "something you have to remove, something you have to add, and then you are good to go."
+
+## Is It Worth It? A King's Ransom (and a Managed Truth)
+
+Naturally, the money question came up, and Mubarak answers it carefully, deliberately dumbing the numbers down "not to raise your hopes high." Working remotely from Ghana for a US company, he sketches rough annual figures: a junior around $40,000 to $50,000, a mid up to $80,000 or $90,000, a senior around $100,000. For a mid-level developer aiming at Germany, he floats a target of around €50,000. He mentions a friend in Brazil at a top tech company who, by his account, could come home and "live like a king in Ghana."
+
+But the most touching part is not the numbers, it is the family. When Mubarak got the job and went home, he could only bring himself to tell his folks "one-fourth of the amount," because the full figure was simply unbelievable to them. His dad still calls, he laughs, to ask "what's the name of the job again?", clearly relaying it to friends. The host, comparing notes, admitted his own mother still cannot quite explain what he does. It is a diaspora-tech rite of passage: doing well at something your parents cannot fully picture, and quietly loving them for trying.
+
+Mubarak's verdict lands softly and firmly. You have already "learned a whole career by becoming a developer." Putting in a little more effort to prepare for interviews, to showcase those skills to high-paying employers, is more than worth it.
+
+## A Quiet Blueprint
+
+What makes Mubarak's story resonate is that none of it depends on luck or credentials he did not have. No degree, no network, no shortcut. Just build the boring project, over-communicate, bother the right people, treat interviewing as its own discipline, and remember that whatever you are stuck on, someone has already done it.
+
+Huge thanks to Mubarak Awal for the warmth and the honesty, and yes, we will hold him to that promise of a second session. You can watch the full conversation in the video linked above.