2017 was an incredible year for me, both personally and professionally. If you’re a regular visitor to my blog you know that I write the year in reviews to fight with my imposter syndrome, to hold myself accountable, to keep a log of what I do, and to see how I improve myself as a developer over the years.
π¦ 2017 Year in Review: β Open Source, TheDevCouple, Leadership, & What’s Next?!
Ahmad AwaisThis review, in particular, will help you understand the life of a full-time open source developer, the job market, and other cool stuff.
Well, hello there. Thanks for stopping by.
It looks like youβre interested in getting to know me better. Well, Iβm happy to oblige. You see, for the last couple of years, I publish these detailed and extensive βYear-in-Reviewβ posts to keep track of my progress, changes, achievements, and more. Mostly to help fight that silly imposter syndrome β but hey it makes for a good read. If youβd like to know who I am and what I stand for, then read the following:
This time around I got late in publishing and writing this review for so many reasons. But hey, I am doing it now, it’s still the fΜΆiΜΆrΜΆsΜΆtΜΆ, sΜΆeΜΆcΜΆoΜΆnΜΆdΜΆ, third month of 2018 so, I hope it still counts β note to the future self.
It’s a long read, like over 6,000 words. Parts of this article were written in Dev, 2017, and then Jan/Feb 2018. While instead of waiting more, I just hit the publish button (at the end you’ll know what I was waiting for and why I got late).
π€ Who is Ahmad Awais?#
At the end of every year, I try to redefine to myself who I am. When I read my earlier reviews, it gives me perspective on a lot of things.
β So, let’s start there…
π I’m Ahmad Awais, I am a Full Stack Web Developer, a huge Open Source Advocate, and a WordPress evangelist.
π DEVELOPER
- I started writing code when I was ten years old.
- In the last 12 years, I have worked ridiculously hard to build a huge community of developers around my work β as of now β over 30,000 developers use 100+ professional open source software packages that I created and maintain. People use my software to write better software themselves or to improve their development workflows.
- The open source free WordPress plugins and themes that I have developed have been downloaded ~500,000+ times β cool.
- I am a Regular WordPress Core Contributing developer. I contribute to a lot of other WordPress projects like WP REST API, Gutenberg, Customizer, WooCommerce, EDD, etc.
- Web Contributions: My other web contributions are to improve code/docs, fix bugs, and patch security in a variety of community software like Bootstrap, Oh My ZSH, Cobalt2 themes for Sublime Text/Slack/iTerm, Editus, CSS Grid Playground by MozillaDev, GatsbyJS, etc.
- I’d be doing something right, coz the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg said amazing things about my contributions in the AWP Gutenberg Interview series. (πI cherish such moment like a little boy, who got the game night tickets sitting up close to the game).
But at the core of my heart, I am a teacher! I come from a family of teachers, both my grandparents and my parents teach higher education β I can’t help but think that’s genetic. The love for teaching others what I self-learned has helped me do wonderful things, that I am actually proud of.
β COMMUNITY
- This has led me to create an entire WordPress community in Pakistan from scratch.
- When I started blogging about 15 years ago, there weren’t any conferences or meetups about WordPress for me to go to.
- So, I organized a number of workshops and meetups β now I represent both WordPress and DigitalOcean for their official local meetup groups, as a lead organizer.
- That and I have conducted about over 50 events with thousands of participants on topics like open source, JavaScript, Web, WordPress, Design, Ethics, etc.
π£ SPEAKER
- I love to talk, I am what they call a social animal. Conferences, monthly meetups, brain dump, yeah that’s me.
- It was a humble moment for me to get recognized as community influencer when I was asked to give a TED talk at a TEDx event in Lahore.
- I have fought with my stage fright to become an established speaker on the web, open source, and WordPress events, including international peer-reviewed presentations at IETEC Loop Conference, Brainiac Conference, ICOSST, etc.
- Published Author/Writer: I’ve worked my ass off to get featured (it’s hard, I know) and published in several international blogs or magazines, E.g. SmashingMag, SitePoint, TorqueMag, Envato Tuts+ Code Instructor (100+ Articles), and a number of other publications.
π° TEACHER
- One thing I forgot to mention is that I am an Electrical Engineer (just like ten other engineers in my family, cousins, etc.) β so even though I did my majors in Computer Science β I learned a lot about web and development on my own. That’s why I teach and blog about it! That’s why most of us do it, I guess.
- Web Community Influencer: I have taught over 5,000 software engineering students and ran community outreach programs throughout my career.
π¦ ENTREPRENEUR
- I have 12+ years of Industrial/Entrepreneurial experience.
- Led one web-services based startup to more than a million dollar per anum revenue before it was acquired.
- I have successfully sold two of my companies and several products in different USD six-figure acquisitions.
- In the Y- Combinator’s Plan9 Ideas Battle I received the second best idea award and got incubated for a short while.
βββ
π°
2017
So, every year you start with all that motivation to win over the world, break your own records, and who knows what else. This time it was different for me. I got married in Dec 2016 and took about three months off. A lot happened in that time. Maedah and I were able to get settled in LHR and took care of a lot of pending chores related to our new house.
Though, we didn’t get enough time to travel β that was a bummer. β
It was February already, and I had started working on a huge project of mine Vacation Rentals β It’s like Airbnb for WordPress. A massive project that extends WordPress for Vacation Rentals booking, indexing, curating, etc. I recommend you take a look at its documentation to understand it better.
But the start of 2017, for me, was all about Writy.io.
At the same time, I had promised everyone to share a big news about what I have had been building for about four months at that time. It was a massive undertaking, I had started building a whole new WordPress Editor β based on JavaScript and it was 43% complete already.
I actually spent about 5,000 USD on buying this awesome domain name for it, i.e. Writy.io. And I wrote about that I am building a new WordPress Editor.
π₯ Last year in Sep, I started working on a new #WordPress Editor. Glad @photomatt announced core's editor focus! π WP is getting better! π― pic.twitter.com/qlwuhDPo1G
— Ahmad Awais (@MrAhmadAwais) February 12, 2017
π€ Writy’s Motivation: The idea was to innovate the writing experience for WordPress and build a SaaS platform on top of it. I actually posted a teaser in a post that’s linked below. Sadly, all of that time I didn’t know Matt Mullenweg was going to announce a new open source WordPress editor that now we know by the name of Gutenberg.
β‘ Gutenberg Was Announced: As soon as I got to know about Gutenberg (WCUS 2016), I stopped developing Writy. By the end of March 2017, I was knee deep in the Gutenberg project, attending the meetings and posting the notes at Make. In a way, I had accepted that for whatever reason I am not going to compete this new editor Gutenberg, and actually improve upon it by giving back my time to as a full-time open sourcerer.
π©Loss of thousands of dollars: The idea of spending thousands of dollars in buying a domain, getting the designs ready, spending four months building 43% of Writy β and now suspending this project took a toll on me. My wife would advise me what to do and what not to do, and honestly β she kept me sane through this phase of tough transition.
π€#
What Happened to Writy?#
After contributing to the Gutenberg project for about a year and understanding its true potential, I left my editor idea and moved on to making a first-class Gutenberg compatible WordPress theme.
This time, I am not doing it alone. I have partnered up with an awesome dev/designer Rich Tabor, who runs ThemeBeans to create a blogging theme that’s truly amazing. We’re super excited.
Subscribe here to get updates about when we release Writy β
β Building Gutenberg Boilerplate: Anywho, I dove right in. Started building Gutenberg blocks. Had lots of chats with the Gutenberg team, especially Joen. I went ahead, studied the source code, received a lot of help from the Gutenberg team (Matias Ventura, James Nylen, Riad Benguella, Andrew Duthie, Joen, etc.) to finally build a boilerplate.
π The Gutenberg Boilerplate was meant to get WordPress developers excited about the new editor. I released it to the public in July 2017. I think Gutenberg was at version 0.4.0 at that time. Yeah, way too early.
π STATS & IMPACT:
- ~600 Stargazers at GitHub Repo.
- 5 Contributors and hundreds of emails.
- Sarah wrote about it on WPTavern: Gutenberg Boilerplate Demonstrates How to Build Custom Blocks.
- Many other blogs and news sites shared it and developers started building blocks with it β which was super nice.
- At WordCamp US 2017, Gutenberg Boilerplate went viral β and everyone started taking Gutenberg more seriously.
π¨βπ«#
TEACHING
Building A Course Platform β Never Launching It
If you have ever been to a conference where I gave a talk, or if you are one of my meetups attendees β then you know one thing about me. I love to teach.
I know it’s genetic and all that, but I can’t help it. Brain dumping has a nice effect on my mood. But that’s a story for another day.
π So, in 2017, I finally become serious about teaching online. I have been teaching via in-person workshops. But online there’s a huge audience.
π€ I knew I had to invest in a better mic, create videos, find a good learn management system (let’s call it a course building platform) and boom.
π So, here’s how I went about it, read it like you are sitting inside my brain and can actually hear what the brain is thinking and ordering me to do next (βFAIR WARNING: Do NOT try this at home):
- π΅οΈββοΈ STEP #1: Research everything, talk to my friends like Kent C Dodds, Morten, etc. and figure out the best way to move forward. I spent an entire month (part-time) doing just that.
- βΊ STEP#2: Settle for a recording software β I use ScreenFlow to record and edit my screencasts on Mac.
- πΉ STEP #3: Get a nice DSLR camera (for no reason at all) β My camera is Nikon D5300 with Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 VC and a Slik s304 tripo-pro professional tripod.
- π STEP #4: Invest in a good quality Mic. I acted upon the advice of the Chris Coyer and Shawn Hesketh β My mic is the Rode Podcaster on a Rode PSA1 Boom Arm with the Rode PSM1 Shockmount and a Rode WS2 pop shield.
- π€ STEP #5: Have a portable mic for when I am traveling β I also bought a portable mic called Blue SnowFlake hereβs a picture of it and a silly custom boom arm with it.
- π STEP #6: Get distracted and research about different mics, audio systems (learn Audacity again, and step it up a little β to learn Adobe Audition this time), get these new mics shipped here (since not available in the local market), fight with customs officials (they didn’t let me ship it), get my sister-in-law Nida to buy the Rode podcaster in London and get it shipped to Qatar, from where my brother-in-law Usman brought it to Lahore. There we go, another month spent.
- πΈ STEP #7: Buy six domains for different courses I am going to record because we are too excited aren’t we? Set up two domains first β let’s do a free and a pro course.
- πΈ STEP #8: Since I am an open sourcerer β I thought, I should make my first course free β not sure why. Spent two weeks pinning down the details of a free + pro course and recorded 90% of the free course.
- π STEP #9: Let’s build a landing page for signups β Which platform should I use? The framework? Started with WordPress, moved to Vue, then to React, and finally went with a static site built with JavaScript and bit of React. Confused. Welcome to the internet today.
- π STEP #10: Build a custom course platform (nothing out there fit my bill) β Spent three weeks to build a course platform, designed it, a JavaScript SPA (single page app), that uses WordPress as a backend with WP REST API. Oh, I forgot to mention the course is also about WP REST API. And now what?!
- π© REVIEW PROGRESS: Now after all this, I was three and a half months into my next big endeavor (sold two of my commercial products and a share to my partners to support my time on this). I had all the equipment, all the details, domains, servers, frameworks, custom landing pages, heck even had built myself a custom course platform but instead of recording the last four videos I was left with, here’s what I chose to do. Engineers!
- π STEP #11: Over-engineer the course platform
β I should know who’s taking my course, their name is the least I could ask for, but not at the registration page (that would mean low conversion rates), but after they log in for the first time. Built another custom solution for this.
β The registration should happen with WP REST API and my users should get a login URL at the first time. A custom solution was built again.
β Oops β WP REST API: Does NOT Trigger New User Notifications! Create a core trac ticket to patch the WordPress core #40477.
β How about the ability to know a user’s progress? How many videos a user has watched, and maybe send them an email if they left at 60% progress. β That’d be cool? But how do I do emails this time?
β Instead of embedding Vimeo Pro, let’s stream it via an HTML5 player. Yet another custom HTML5 player was built, with custom speed controls and interaction with the playlist. - π STEP #12: Launch the course? π€ hmm… β
So, yes. I did actually do all that and spent about five months on this.
β It was a hard thing to watch myself dwell in to the pool of over-engineering. I was selling some of my commercial projects and selling out my shares in couple others so, it was kind of a part-time thingy. I had no choice, couldn’t do much else.
β I was also doing 10 to 15 hours per week of contract work and five hours of consultancy during this time. So, at least it was not all that bad.
But what bothers me most is I never got around releasing any of it, that’s the sucker here. BUT I hope to release my courses this year. π―
Here’s a teaser of what I had built for my first course, which is about teaching you folks about WordPress REST API.
π₯ That’s not all. I am building more courses and I hope to actually launch this time. β Hahaha. I know what you’re thinking. Stop it. π
βββ
πΊ
Become A Visual Studio Code Power User!
Before I launch the REST API course, I am building another course about how to become a power user of Visual Studio Code. Already halfway there!
π© While writing this post, I built a quick landing page to go with the announcement. I am moving at a slow pace here, but if I get ~200 signups in the first month, I’ll pick up the pace.
This course will include:
π₯ POWER DEV ESSENTIALS#
- β How to set up VSCode?!
- β Switch from Sublime with Keymapping
- β Debug JavaScript like a Pro #OpenSourcerer!
- β Sync VSCode between diff devices like Chrome
- β Be an awesome developer, get more done in less
πAlso bought a cool domain for this course β VSCode.pro
A COURSE π― FOR EVERY DEVELOPER#
I want this course to be useful for generally every developer and especially web developers, who code with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and even PHP developers.
- πΉ Zero bull**** video lessons
- β‘ Save an hour daily or at least weekly
- π Save four-weeks for side projects every year
- π© Build workflows, learn to write custom snippets
- π Learn to build VSCode Extensions & publish ’em
Wish me luck on this one. I hope to not run after perfection again, it’s a curse. OK, so where were we again?
β #
COMMUNITY
Social Proof, Portfolio, Meetups, Talks, Oh My!
I love to write code, I do. That’s the highlight of my day almost four days a week. But I have this side of me where I try and reach out to the local community, do meetups, give talks, and all that.
2017 was no different. I did lots of stuff to improve my social presence, be more involved with the community, and generally be a better human.
πΊ BTW I watch a lot I mean a lot of TV. 2017 was no different. I have started tracking my TV seasons via Watched.li, here check out my profile β it says
π² Ahmad Awais is currently tracking 77 shows and has seen 4571 episodes.
βββ
π»
Software Apprentice!
I actually took on another software apprentice Saqib Ameen this last year β he’s now part of our TheDevCouple Team.
- An intelligent young man, studying Computer Science at UET Lahore.
- I’m sure in a year or two, he’ll be contributing a lot to open source.
- Currently, he heads the WordPress Urdu Translation Team
- Along with me, and Maedah he arranged the local WordPress Translation Day #3 which went quite well.
π° Whereas my previous apprentice, Ashar Irfan is also doing great, leading the software development behind one of my open source partner companies, called WP Security Audit Log. Check them out.
β Moreover, he became a WordPress Core Contributor last year, which is amazing. Everyone in my team is a contributor now.
I’m happy with this approach of helping others make a difference.
βββ
π¦
Twitter Verified Profile
Not many people know this but I used to be head of marketing at a local agency. It was my first job which had a short lifespan.
β I once crafted and executed a mega marketing campaign for WAAR the movie β led it to 25,000+ IMDb votes, where WAAR ranked as #1 in Highest Rated Feature Films Released In 2013 on IMDb. Also, the most voted movie in the history of Lollywood (PK version of Hollywood).
This goes to state the fact that I am into marketing as well. I think no developer can ever be successful if they can’t market themselves better. So, it was an incredible milestone for me when I got verified on Twitter.
β I wrote more about it β π Got Verified on Twitter! @MrAhmadAwais.
βββ
π
Meetups, Talks, Networking!
In 2017, I did more meetups and talks than I could count. I think it was two to three meetups every single month except for December. The following three meetups were the best.
βββ
MEETUP: π¦ Learn to Host Your WordPress Site With DigitalOcean!
β Teaching people how I host some of my WordPress sites by myself using DigitalOcean was fun. Especially when we had discussions about scaling.
β I actually made a small video tutorial on YouTube for this one.
βββ
TheDevCoupleβs #Hacktoberfest Open Source with WordPress Meetup
β On this meetup, we gathered a bunch of software engineering students and I taught them why Open Source & Git is so important. We had great sponsors i.e. DigitalOcean + GitHub β they also sponsored our pizza. π
βββ
TheDevCoupleβs WordPress & JavaScript Meetup Lahore 2018
π¨πThe fun part of this meetup was that we had Ulrich Pogson attend this meetup all the way from Switzerland. I talked about WordPress & JavaScript and tweeted the link to my slides used in the talk β Zoom-out to make the slides fit your screen, itβs made for 1920px.
π STATS & IMPACT:
- As the earliest organizer of WordPress Meetups Lahore β when I first joined, it had fewer than 30 people as members. With the help of the local community, co-organizers, TheDevCouple team β I have been able to grow this meetup to the 8th largest meetup group worldwide (at the time of writing) with following stats:
β Over 3,250 WordPress Lahore Meetup members.
β 8th Largest WordPress Meetup worldwide.
β Laser focus on Engineers and developers.
β Meetups with international attendees. - The new DigitalOcean Meetup Lahore that I started in 2017 grew to over 500 members in less than a year. We had most incredible meetups with the help of awesome sponsors like DigitalOcean and TheDevCouple partners. π
βββ
π
Interviews, Press Mentions, & Podcasts!
Every now and then I get on a podcast and talk about stuff I work on. This time around it was about Open Source as a Life Style. I did this podcast with the good folks at PressThis Podcast β run by David Vogelpohl – Vice President of Web Strategy – WP Engine.
Since we are talking about WPEngine, I’d like to shout out to Heather J. Brunner, one of the best female CEO’s I know off. She’s led WPEngine to a great deal of success and her passion for open source has helped me complete several open source projects, with WPEngine as a backer.
π€Listen here β Ahmad Awais β Open Source as a Lifestyle β
This year, I got interviewed at several other places like AWP Gutenberg Interview Series, where I talked about Gutenberg development.
- πΊ WATCH THE INTERVIEW: You can listen to the interview on YouTube π₯, WordPress.tv, or on Facebook.
- π READ THE REVIEW: Rich Tabor, wrote an incredible review of my interview here Rich Tabor Responds to the AWP Gutenberg Interview with Ahmad Awais.
I got a lot of press and media mentions throughout 2017, in the form of quotes from different articles that I had written and my comments on the current state of WordPress, Gutenberg, or the reason behind giving back to the community, as well as advice on becoming an open sourcerer, etc.
π One of the mentions that I felt really proud of; was when the co-founder of WordPress β Matt Mullenweg said amazing things about one of my recent projects called the create-guten-block toolkit β which I’ll talk more about at the end.
“It’s a good chance to thank you, Ahmad, for putting together the create-guten-block toolkit. It’s really cool, and I have seen it to be the intro for a lot of people and to kindov learn what Gutenberg is.
So, it’s an awesome awesome contribution to the community.”
β said by Matt Mullenweg (Co-founder of WordPress).
SRC: Matt M. AWP Gutenberg Interview
Apart from this, I got featured in WPTavern, Inc, SMB, Entrepreneur, Tuts+ by Envato, TorqueMag, Inc, Yahoo for Small Business, CodePen, Dev.to, and CreativeMarket blog, SitePoint, and a good deal of other online publications.
βββ
π‘
Newsletter & Blogs!
β I was able to publish 28 posts in 2017 on AhmadAwais.com. Happy to report that I’ve managed to increase the traffic and users of my sites by over 50%. Kinsta gets a huge shoutout here for being the best host. And I also wrote about 80 posts on other blogs like TheDevCouple, and the publications mentioned above.
π¨ Along with my wife, I started a premium newsletter called The WordPress Takeaway β it’s free to access and read but costs us money and time β you can support it by subscribing to a $49.99 per year subscription.
- π€ I never actually launched it properly. It has suffered three months of delay due to more reasons than I could write here. But I have recently asked Saqib and Maedah to help me be more consistent.
- π While it’s based on Sendy (as you can check on what I use page) but I have customized the setup, built a custom API which I open sourced and several other workflows around it, like using Foundation for Emails 2 to build newsletters, using IFTTT workflows, etc. Though, it’s still far from perfect at the moment.β Perfectionist talking.
- π I have combined all the newsletters Maedah and I used to send from different sites like from AhmadAwais.com. MaedahBatool.com, TheDevCouple.com, WPMetaList.com, WP-Pakistan.com, etc. into one single newsletter which now has over 23,000 developers, designers, C Level Business folks as subscribers and is continuously growing.
βββ
π
Helping Developers!
I’ve been a full-time open source developer for about two years now. It’s been a huge undertaking. But like many of you out there, I have learned a lot by myself.
So, as much as my father is proud of me for completing my Electrical Engineering degree with good grades (and not for dropping out of Executive MBA) β I credit all of my accomplishments to a trait of self-learning. Yay! π
π― When you learn tech stuff by yourself β you realize how hard it is for others. That’s the reason why I write, talk, arrange meetups, and do a lot of teaching. Meanwhile, to help developers online, I have chosen to open source a lot of my code at GitHub and I spend time on StackOverflow as well.
βββ
#1β β‘ GitHub β for Open Source#
I’m very happy with my progress of sharing open source code and helping the FOSS community at GitHub. In 2017:
- β I’ve got 600 followers, open sourced 100 source repos that received 2,760 stargazers, and shared 239 Gists. That’s about over 400% growth from 2016. Crazy dance πΊ
- π The most exciting time was when my projects got featured on the GitHub trending page, under the JavaScript category, then under all languages, and finally I got listed among the trending developers worldwide which was one of the most humbling moments for me.
- One fun fact has been that in 2016 most of my repos were PHP repos and now the number of my JavaScript repositories have almost doubled in number as compared to PHP. Which’s true. I have moved to full stack JavaScript development.
βββ
#2β β‘ StackOverflow β for DevRels & Help#
StackOverflow has helped me a lot. So many folks give back their time to teach and to help other developers on this network that it’s mere impact on the software community is nothing short of being historic.
In 2017 my StackOverflow profile grew over 300%:
- π² ~3,500,000 million developers received helped by reading the answers to technical questions I posted. It’s huge.
- π My profile reputation grew 340% from ~1,400 to ~6,000 putting it in top 0.75% StackOverflow members and 77th in PK.
- π I became a moderator at StackOverflow β woot-woot!
βββ
#3β β‘ Dev.to() β for Developers#
I think Dev.to() platform by my friends Ben and Jess deserves a special mention. It’s like Medium but for developers only. And I think it’s destined for great things in the next couple of years.
- β I started writing and sharing few things at Dev.to()
- πΉ Read: What to Expect from Dev.to() in 2018?
- π Dev.to() sponsored lots of stickers for the audience and T-Shirts for the organizers last year on my meetups. I love that T-Shirt. TQ Peter.
- π Definitely, shop Dev.to() swag, it’s π― worth it.
π#
CAREER GROWTH
Open Source,TheDevCouple, Google’s Job Offer!
I care about my career growth a lot. I believe turning Pro is a mindset. That’s how I progressed from an Electrical Engineer to a Computer Science Engineer, from frontend to backend, PHP to JavaScript, and then to Full Stack development. Where I go after two years of nearly full-time open source development is also very important!
π€ I’ll let you in on a secret. I’m getting more serious about JavaScript than ever. I’ve spent last 12 years with WordPress, most of it doing PHP. But back in 2013 β I started Node.js development, one thing led to another and the rest is history.
Today, I am going to discuss several things here, how I chose to go full-time open source, several private crowdfunding campaigns I ran with my wife, and how did I end up interviewing at the big G i.e. Google.
So, here goes nothing…
βββ
π
Open Source & TheDevCouple Campaign!
I was giving back 30% to 50% of my productive time to open source back in 2015. Stepped it up in 2016 a lot and I finally started getting the feeling that I’ll be using my rainy day money sooner than I had planned for.
π€ With an added expenses of getting married at the end of 2016 and working full-time on open source + Writy going down as a suspended side projectβ I knew I had to reach out to the community for supporting my work or find a new job.
π° So, I did just that. First of all, it was a decision between starting with a Kickstarter like Daniel or an Indiegogo campaign like JJJ, but then I got cold feet. What if nobody cared? That would be insulting β my mind starting playing games with me β imposter syndrome took control.
π But before all that, I didn’t have one thing that I could promise. I do a lot of stuff. Contribute to the core, different WP components, Gutenberg, and I also maintain hundreds of my own open source projects.
π So, I decided why not try GiveWP or build a custom donation Patreon page for my campaign. I actually went ahead and bought YearWithWP.com. Started setting it up and then gave up on it. I thought I’m wasting my time on stuff that mattered less. I should be doing FOSS and not this.
π While all of this was happening I had already reached out to a couple of WordPress businesses and told them about what I was thinking of doing. In about a month I had 11 businesses on-board ready to support my open source work. I never saw that coming. AH.
π― I have to give credit to Robert Abela from WP Security Audit Log he was not only my first sponsor in this campaign but he also encouraged me to move forward with my plan. BTW check out his plugin, it’s a good one. I use it myself. One of my apprentices, Ashar, builds it.
π€ So, within three months of this whole campaign, I was able to find over 20 WordPress businesses which either directly benefited from my open source software packages or generally wanted to support my work.
π That’s how I ran my first several private funding campaigns that led me to not only support and maintain my open source software packages but also helped me build exciting new ones like create-guten-block (discussed below).
π TheDevCouple Backers & Partners
What/How? Read more about it β
Following are the set of awesome companies that sponsored my time on open source, helped me and my wife rebootTheDevCouple in many different ways, like building a team and taking on a new apprentice and contributing back to WordPress. Definitely, check them out or read more about it β
π A huge thank you to Gravity Form for being the ultimate sponsor and Kinsta for offering to host all of our sites with about 3,000,000 visitors a year. Over 50% of my traffic increased when I moved to Kinsta in October. And every other partner who made it possible.
β© All the partners who supported and paid for at least a week of my time on open source were a big deal to me. So, my wife and I rebooted the TheDevCouple blog and started writing long-form-reviews with extensive details on our sponsors’ products as a way to thank them in return.
π I only partnered with the businesses I believed in. It was not a blind decision to reach out to any of these businesses and we had long sessions of discussions before jumping into this sort of sponsor/partner relation. As a thank you to all of my partners, we did the following:
- β Listed each partner (with a sophisticated algorithm) under ~600 posts throughout five blogs/sites we had, to increase word-of-mouth.
- β Listed each partner on partner pages, their deals, and on 100’s of GitHub repositories as project backers. This was huge. Second most clicked resources as per GitHub traffic are developers checking out these awesome backers.
- β Shared products, reviews, and updates about our partners through 20+ social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts we handle. Each partner and their reviews also made it to our newsletter of 23k+ subscribers.
β½ This sponsorship was meant to support my time on open source but rather my wife’s management turned it into something completely different. She was able to bring in Saqib as our apprentice, we were able to increase the local meetups, and last but not the least I got time to release three times as many open source packages as I did back in 2016.
πI couldn’t have done it with her, so, huge props to Maedah on being the best technical manager I’d ever hoped for. BTW Maedah also published here 2017 year in review at her blog.
β We did lots of open source work last year including:
- π WordPress Couple (Maedah and I) become Core Contributors of WordPress 4.8 β which was absolutely amazing, the first couple?
- π‘ In WordPress 4.9 everyone in the TheDevCouple Team contributed to the WordPress Core. Maedah and I, along with Ashar (first time π) contributed to the WordPress Core whereas Saqib led the WordPress 4.9 Urdu translation to 100% completion the third time.
- π I also contributed to a number of other projects, minor contributions here and there in Create React Redux Router App, Gutenberg project, improved WP-CLI Handbook, Gutenberg Handbook, MovingToHttps, and also the JavaScript tester Ava, WooCommerce-custom-orders-table by LiquidWeb, improved CSS Grid playground by Mozilla and listed it on Gatsby.js, improved the official Bootstrap’s site, Modern JSCheatsheet & ES6 Guide, Ryan’s not-trac, Cobalt2 theme, and WordPress ServerHappy page among other things.
- β± Got listed as a WordPress Influencer and it looks like Matt Cromwell will be following my work in 2018 β which’s incredible coming from him.
βββ
π¦
Highlight Open Source Project create-guten-block β
I know I released this project in Jan 2018 but I have had been working on it for about the last three months of 2017. So, yes this is the open source project I want to highlight here.
This project is what I am most excited about this year. It has helped thousands of developers get started with the block development for the new WordPress editor called Gutenberg.
π‘ Bit of a backstory for this project is that I had already created Gutenberg Boilerplate but it went stale with every new major release of Gutenberg. It was really hard to update that as well. Also, I wanted to create a webpack starter for WordPress. But not just that, I was creating an ESLint + Prettier configuration starter for WordPress as well.
π― All of that became one single huge monorepo project built with JavaScript especially Node.js. Here’re are a few highlights of this project:
- π Make sure you star the
create-guten-block
repo for updates. - π¬ I wrote a blog on it: Create Guten Block Toolkit: Launch, Introduction, Philosophy, & More!
- π
create-guten-block
is my most viral project to date. It has been featured as a GitHub trending project and got me listed under the trending developers as well. - π» More than 15,000 developers have downloaded this project for about ~40,000 times in about 1.5 months of its lifespan.
- π The Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, said amazing things about this project in the AWP Gutenberg Interview Series.
- β Call for contributors to build create-guten-block 2.0 is up.
β there’s a lot more than what I could fit in the confines of a single post here. But this should give you an idea of what I am up to. For more read here β
βββ
π
Looking For The Next Big Opportunity!
So, without further ado, let me share this with you that I am in the job market looking for the next big opportunity for me. I’m humbled and honored to be at the receiving end of multiple job offers and proposals to apply from incredible companies like Google, Facebook, eBay, DigitalOcean, Intel, Amazon, 10up, etc.
β° This has been the biggest reason behind delay on publishing this post. I wanted to publish it after joining a company but… in short, I am currently interviewing and have not settled for a single company yet.
I had made up my mind of getting a job at the start of 2017. Here’s what I wrote in a blog post that I never published…
π
If your company wants a full stack web developer with a proven track record of open source leadership. One who should care deeply about your next-gen web project and get other developers excited about it as well. All of that while leading a team of engineers that would go on to make a DENTβ’ in JS and web-standards, then do reach out. I want to do all that and humbly feel like the best candidate for such a position.
π³ For about five years now, I have had been doing my own thing. Created several startups and led them to diff acquisitions + a services-based company, created and sold products, did lots of open source work.
β WordPress Gutenberg project adopted React JavaScript framework and then dropped it due to the licensing issues. I wrote my views on this whole subject and I created an issue that later turned into a sort of a campaign for choosing the next JavaScript framework for WordPress. A lot happened there, which I should mention here for context:
- π I reached out to different JavaScript communities and asked them to start a discussion about this.
- π WordPress is 30% of the web, so it attracted a huge amount of attention (more than anyone of us had expected) and the issue became one of those unicorn GitHub issues, with lots of discussion happening and people ranting.
- π¦ I had long discussions and chats with folks like Dan Abramov, Andrew Clark from the Core React team, Evan You creator of Vue.js, Dan who built Inferno.js, Patrick creator of Marko.js from eBay, and more Googlers than I could count β who work on projects like Angular, AMP, Chrome, etc. β That was awesome.
- πΊ Later that week, I presented fine folks at Facebook why we need a GPL compatible license for WordPress, the push from Matt Mullenweg and the open source community led to Facebook relicensing React and its sister projects under the MIT license.
- π― I wrote about that in: Did WordPress Just Influence Facebook to Relicense React Under MIT License. I couldn’t help but think I had something to do with this. That was a great achievement in itself!
- π We even interviewed the Core React Team at Facebook.
β All of this brought the open source community together and many major tech companies started looking at WordPress as a very serious player in the open web. Rightly so. Many discovered that it now has a REST API.
π² To my surprise, I found out that engineers and developers at giant tech companies like Google, Facebook, Intel, etc. were using some of the software packages that I had open sourced like Gutenberg Boilerplate and then create-guten-block
.
π― It was a proud moment for me as an open source developer. #AH. Many wanted to discuss this and consulted with me about Gutenberg and what’s next with WordPress in the release of 5.0. I did contract consultation work and also pitched a project at Google.
π¨βπ» Soon after that, I started receiving emails from engineers (not recruiters) at Google, Intel, DO, 10up, Amazon, etc. asking me to either apply for a particular job they had in mind or direct job offers to lead a team.
π I’ve been at the receiving end of many recruiters’ emails like these before but this time it was different, it was engineers actually using my code. I had discussions with Googlers about the future of WordPress and how they wanted to improve the web by improving WordPress.
πΌ So, I did what any engineer in my position would do. I said NO! Haha, that’s true. But then after a few more calls from different devs/engineers, long and hard discussions with my wife (and later our families), we decided to give it a go. Yes, both Maedah and I are interviewing at the moment.
π¦ So, my wife and I took Dec/Jan/Feb off, to interview at a few companies, including the ones I shared above. Both our interviews at Google went quite well, our recruiter came back with good-news-feedback from our interviewers and moved us to the HC stage. Then we had lots of issues related to all the relocation to the HQ and US immigration, etc. and at the time of writing this is where we are. I’ll update this when we both make a decision.
β There are companies and job offers that would relocate us to a new country, which is a huge undertaking, and there are companies equally as good that are interested in hiring us as remote employees. This is one of the most overwhelming (in a good way) and confusing (decision paralysis) time of my life. #TrueStory.
β What’s Next?#
Well, that’s a million dollar question ain’t it. The thing is, after doing my own thing for so long and finally accepting the fact that I am going to work for an awesome tech company in a month or two from now β I am still going through the interviews at a few companies. Here’s what my state of mind looks like at the moment:
- β I have 12 years of WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Open source experience. I do want to bet on that but want to move into a Dev Relations role at a good company.
- β I don’t want to completely give up development any time soon, but I am growing as a JavaScript Engineer and that’s what I want to do next. Maybe ML and neural networks in a near future too, but not on my own. Not leaving the open source eco-system either.
- π© I want to get involved in the JavaScript and web specs drafting and leading the next generation of open web (and believe me it says JS all over it). That means having a huge company to support this vision, help me get to present on this and bring consistencies throughout the JS eco-system.
- π Don’t want to be the guy with red-shoes i.e. this next decision means a lot to me. I am not a change my employer every year kindov guy. While I am ready to relocate, it a decision that favors loyalty.
- πΌSo, it’s JavaScript, web, and leading the open web platform in the next five to ten years is what my plan looks like. Is it a bad thing that I crave leadership?! I wish it was one of those things you could ask your parents about.
For all of that, I am trying to make the best choice right now. I suppose I’ll be interviewing at four more companies before I hibernate and come back with a decision to where I want to work next.
βββ
β I shared all of this not for any other purpose but to hold myself accountable (there were so many days when I wanted to not write a review that had no proper ending), share my journey as a software engineer, and to help new developers understand the landscape, life, and workflows of a for-now full-time open source developer.
I spent a lot of time writing, compiling, and publishing this post. It would mean the world to me if you Tweet this post or share it on your preferred social channel β Facebook, LinkedIn, or your company Slack channel (I am on the job hunt, of course, that’d be great).
Finally. Don’t forget to say π on Twitter @MrAhmadAwais β
I made lots of friends this last year. Which was the best part of it really! Lost and gained weight with my irregular jogging routine, and relatively recently I have joined a gym to be more serious about my health. All in all, it was a great year β lots of memories.
Peace! β
Developers Takeaway
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