Ahmad Awais

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๐ŸŽจ 1 Million+ Developer Users of My Shades of Purple Theme

Ahmad AwaisAhmad Awais
๐Ÿ™Œ Howdy! This piece is a part of my 2018 Year in Review (read the context) โ†’

That’s right. Something incredibly amazing happened last year. After switching to VSCode, I struggled with finding a good theme that was actually built for VSCode and not just a theme migrated from another editor.

So, I built this suit of themes called ๐Ÿฆ„ Shades of Purple for VSCode, iTerm2, Hyper Terminal, Slack, AlfredApp, HighlightJS, Prism React, Code Surfer, and even got community contributions in the form of the same theme being ported for Cygwin and Konsole. Proud of it, AH!

Shades Of Purple

โœ… When you build something to solve your own problems and share it with others (especially as a Free & Open Source Software) chances are it can click well with them. This is exactly what happened here.

๐Ÿค” I was building the LMS platform to host my VSCode.pro course. I would code the same logic as the video end event in JavaScript, PHP, Go-lang, CSS, and HTML. So, a variable like videoEnd had representation in all these languages. Interesting?!

โŒ Guess what? Every programming language would color the variables different. At one time I had yellow, blue, pink, red, and green colors as the syntax highlighting for the same damn variable across different languages. That would mess my brain up.

๐Ÿคฏ So, I went ahead and built a theme that’s consistent enough across 30+ languages and is inspired by many great themes. I got a couple of designer friends to review the theme’s design and worked on its accessibility.

โšก๏ธ This project quickly became my favorite side-project and has helped me become a better programmer. I know the data types by their color (so when things go wrong my brain can pick it up before a linter does). Amazing!

๐Ÿ˜ฎ What happened with the Shades of Purple project was beyond any kind of growth I have ever seen for my open source software. Maybe it’s the awesome VSCode community or just maybe for once I created something really useful. Who knows. Check out the stats:

WOW! OK, maybe that’s too much. But hey, I love it. Shades of Purple theme has created the sort of a geeky #PurpleRevolution. Everyone knows I love the purple color. Purple is genius.

Peace! โœŒ๏ธ

Go ahead and install the ๐Ÿฆ„ Shades of Purple VSCode theme โ†’

Founder & CEO at Langbase.com โ€” The Composable AI Developer platform ยท Serverless AI Cloud ยท Ship agentic AI pipes, tools, and memory with BaseAI โ€” The first Web AI Framework (free, open-source, local-first, deploys serverless, agentic pipes, tools, and memory)

Ex VP DevTools & DevRel Eng. Rapid ยท Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ’ป AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor โฏ AI/ML Advisory Board San Francisco, DevNetwork

๐ŸŽฉ Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate ๐ŸฆŠ Google Developers Expert Web DevRel ๐Ÿš€ NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor ๐Ÿ† 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 5x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer).

๐ŸŒณ Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. ๐Ÿ“Ÿ Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation and VSCode.pro course. Over 142 million views, 24 yrs Blogging, 108K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.

โœŒ๏ธ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized by millions of developers worldwide โ“ฆ WordPress Core Developer ๐Ÿ“ฃ TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.

โœจ As quoted by: Satya Nadella ยท CEO of Microsoft โ€” Awais is an awesome example for developers.
๐Ÿ’œ Loves his wife (Maedah) โฏ Read more about Ahmad Awais.

๐Ÿ‘‹โ€ฆ Awais is mostly active on ๐• @MrAhmadAwais

๐Ÿ“จ

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Comments 1
  • Yuvraj Khavad
    Posted on

    Yuvraj Khavad Yuvraj Khavad

    Reply Author

    I am also one of them. Thanks for the nice theme.