Zenkoders Giacomo Guiulfo, Tomas Bisi, Angelina Shula and Gibran Kalta
Zenkoders are building a graphical user interface to make data storage usage and statistics more consumable and, therefore, more actionable. Their application pulls the utilization data from UTAPI and manipulates it for presentation. Zenkoders members Tomas Bisi, Jibran Kalta, Anhelina Shulha and Giacomo Guiulfo are almost done with their hackathon UI project.
When Tomas isn’t coding, you might find him sailing or playing in a band. He came to the U.S. three years ago after having earned a B.A. in music production from EMBA School of Music in Argentina. His first foray into programming came in the form of a coding bootcamp that he attended in Miami, and now he’s got the bug. Working as a professional sailor—racing and coaching—he moved to San Francisco and learned about 42 while out on the water from Scality’s COO, Erwan Menard, and has been at the school for about 9 months now. He’s got lots of interests—in addition to sailing, he sings and plays drums and guitar—but he’s 100% immersed in and passionate about programming.
Jibran is originally from Pakistan. He moved here with his family in time to complete his last year of high school in Dallas, then go on to earn a Bachelor’s degree on University Studies from UT Arlington. After college, he taught Arabic for a few years, then founded an ecommerce start-up with some friends. That venture, selling camping gear, closed down recently, but from that experience, he learned that he wanted to learn to code so he could build things. He read about 42 in a Tech Crunch article, so came to check it out by joining the “Piscine”. Needless to say, he stayed, and has been at 42 for 6 months now. For Jibran, being able to build things makes it thoroughly addictive.
Anhelina started at 42 at the same time as Jibran and Giacomo. She came to the Silicon Valley from Miami, where she managed a restaurant while she was waiting to get her residency status established so that she could qualify for in-state tuition. She had already earned a Bachelor’s degree in Finance after studying Engineering for three years at a university in Ukraine and finishing-up through distance-learning with a Moscow university after she moved to Miami. She learned about 42 through Google search: she was looking for a coding school she could attend while she waited to qualify for in-state tuition so that she could take some classes.
Giacomo learned about 42 from an IBM employee who spoke at a conference that he attended in Peru. That was it–he knew it was for him. He had attended university in Peru for one semester, but made his way here as soon as he was able to get his residency status worked out. Where is he headed? Giacomo knows that he wants to embark on a startup when he’s finished at 42. Exactly what that startup will be, he doesn’t know. He knows that things change quickly, so he’ll decide what his startup’s focus will be by assessing needs when he moves to that next stage.
