At age 7, he is the world’s youngest programmer.
Child prodigies are not at all new but they just continue to amaze us. Now, they are building codes.
Recently, we featured Isabel Sieh from the Philippines who, at only 10 years old, has already built her own company called Girls Will Code which teaches Filipino girls basic programming. Pretty young for her age to have that skill, but that’s what child prodigies are made of.
If you think that she’s already the youngest programmer in the world, well, you obviously haven’t met Muhammad Hamza Shahzad.
The wunderkind Muhammad is only 7 years old and yet he is more than qualified to do computer programming. When he was a year younger, he became the world’s youngest Microsoft Office Professional after he passed a test. He trained for six months and got a score of 757 points to claim the sought-after certificate. His score is a few points more than the required which is 700.
He took three more Microsoft exams after that. This made him proficient in Software Development Fundamentals, MS Word, MS PowerPoint and MS Excel. All of these are stepping stones of his parents’ grand dream for Muhammad to be like Bill Gates.
Now living in Handsworth in Birmingham, United Kingdom, Muhammad is trained by his mother Seemab, together with his father Asim, who is a high-tech wizard at an American IT company Cyber Royal. When he was still a toddler, he was observed that he thinks beyond his age.
Muhammad was given his own laptop at only two and half years old. Little do his parents know that their only child will become a computer whizz.
His father would say that Muhammad sets his own standards at school. He shares, “We try to make him better not just for him, but for others. This is what we can do for him.” At school, it’s usual that the students, and even teachers, turn to Muhammad for help whenever they have computer problems.
Muhammad says, “When there’s a problem, teachers ask me to help the children.”
Due to his advanced skills, the family finds it hard to find a school that fits Muhammad’s needs. They have just transferred from Croydon to Birmingham about nine months ago, where they admitted Muhammad to Ark Oval Primary.
If he wants to, Muhammad can choose to leave primary school. He could already land a high-paying job in most IT companies with his qualifications.
A spokesman from Microsoft has regarded the boy wonder to have the skills which can easily create Web App and manage to develop his own basic shopping cart app. He shares, “He has got his hands dirty in Windows desktop App, console App, Windows services, Web services and finds it really fun to develop simple console-based game applications.”
The computer whizz kid can also explain about heap, stack, memory management, and data structures, perhaps better than many experienced programmers, the spokesman added.
While he hasn’t found the perfect school for him, Muhammad is now focused in developing a game he claims to be won by 30 clicks only. This he does while playing football with his father in their spare time.
