Puck Meerburg is a self-taught coder and has developed ten smartphone apps across Android and iOS, one of which has been downloaded over 300,000 times. Last year he won an Apple Design Award and this year he was the grand prize winner of the Google Code-In coding competition.
And he’s only 15 years old.
He began coding at six years old, codes in ten different programming languages and has talked at TedXYouth and the Next Web so he takes to the Web Summit stage like an old pro.
The Dutch teen calls himself a hacker (“the kind of person who makes furniture with an axe”) because he is curious about how things work and so likes to take them apart.
This has gotten him into a bit of hot water: he hacked into a popular Dutch scheduling service that is used by over a million people and has 75 per cent market share to show the company how easy it would be for someone with malicious intent to bypass their security system.
“They were a bit nervous when they found out what I was doing but I explained that I meant no harm and it did offer them insight into how the system was used, helping them to improve the product,” he explains.
Meerburg says that he loves hacking but it does have its downsides: possible legal action and of course things can get broken but for him it’s worth it: “It’s fun, adds to creativity and problem solving skills … and the best part is you get to take things apart.”
“If you see me typing on my calculator in class I might be doing some difficult maths … or just playing another level of Super Mario,” says Meerburg, who has, you guessed it, hacked a calculator to play computer games.
