Coding for Air Purification Systems
By Raoul Valstar, Co-Founder & COO at AirTulip
Tell us about your background.
I initially studied business and after working several years in different jobs I decided to learn coding to pursue it as a new career. I studied coding on The Odin Project, a free and open source curriculum for both Ruby and JavaScript. This is a great online option where you can create an account to keep track of your progress + a Discord chat to talk to other students and alumni.
While I was studying coding in 2020–2021, I got involved with AirTulip, an air purification company. I’m now full time focused on this startup. The best part is that at AirTulip, I get to apply both business and software skills to build the business. So, I get to utilize what I originally studied while further developing my coding skills.
What do you work on?
At AirTulip, we build cleanroom-grade air purification systems for individual consumers and large businesses, from schools to offices. At the end of this past August, we launched AirTulip Sleep, a purification system designed as a headboard that allows you to sleep in clean air!
How do you use coding in your industry/projects?
We use coding to build our data platform to track the performance of the air purification systems in the field and for air quality monitoring.
Any tips for young coders?
Learn the theory, but also spend a lot of time actually building things and working on projects. This way you learn quickly and can improve while building.
What tools and programming languages do you use?
- Sublime Text
- Github
- Reddit (r/learnprogramming)
- JavaScript
- Ruby
- Python
