Jhankar Mahbub

About Jhankar Mahbub

Jhankar Mahbub is the Founder and CEO of Programming Hero, a gamified coding education platform that has grown into one of the most recognized names in Bangladesh's tech education space. As The Business Standard has described, he became a programming educator without ever formally training as a software engineer.

An Engineer Who Taught Himself to Code

Mahbub graduated from the Industrial and Production Engineering department at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2007, a field with little direct connection to software development. He later completed an MS in Computer Software Engineering at North Dakota State University between 2010 and 2011, formalizing a shift toward programming that had started well before graduate school.

That switch from industrial engineering to software gave him firsthand experience with the exact learning curve his future students would face, largely self-taught rather than trained through a traditional computer science program.

Teaching Before Building a Company

Before Programming Hero existed as an app, Mahbub built a following as a senior web developer, author, YouTuber, and teacher, often working across all of those roles simultaneously. He launched a YouTube channel under the Programming Hero name specifically to reach international learners and funnel them toward a structured bootcamp course.

That YouTube-first approach let him test and refine his teaching style with a global audience before building a dedicated platform around it.

Launching the Programming Hero App

In 2018, Mahbub launched an alpha version of the Programming Hero app, turning what had started as a YouTube channel and bootcamp brand into a standalone education product. The app built on the teaching approach he had already validated through years of video content, structured around practical, project-based coding lessons rather than abstract computer science theory.

Teaching Hundreds of Thousands of Students

Under Mahbub's leadership, Programming Hero has grown to teach more than 600,000 students how to code, using an approach he has consistently described as making programming education fun rather than intimidating. That framing, treating coding education as approachable rather than academically gatekept, has been central to the platform's growth since its earliest YouTube days.

Mahbub continues to lead Programming Hero's growth while maintaining his own public teaching presence, having built the company as much around his personal reputation as an educator as around the app itself.