Ahmad Awais
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.
This 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).
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
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
π£ SPEAKER
π° TEACHER
π¦ ENTREPRENEUR
βββ
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.
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:
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):
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
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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:
πAlso bought a cool domain for this course β VSCode.pro
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.
Wish me luck on this one. I hope to not run after perfection again, it’s a curse. OK, so where were we again?
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.
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I actually took on another software apprentice Saqib Ameen this last year β he’s now part of our TheDevCouple Team.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I’m very happy with my progress of sharing open source code and helping the FOSS community at GitHub. In 2017:
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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%:
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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.
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…
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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).
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
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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:
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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:
create-guten-block repo for updates.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.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
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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…
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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:
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.
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:
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.
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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
Founder & CEO at Langbase.com Β· Ex VP DevRel Rapid Β· Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. π§βπ» AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor β― AI/ML Advisory Board member San Francisco, DevNetwork
π© Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate π¦ Google Developers Expert Web DevRel π NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor π 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 3x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer).
π³ Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. π Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation (100 videos Β· 22 Projects) & VSCode.pro course. Over 142 Million views, 22 yrs Blogging, 56K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.
βοΈ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized by millions of developers worldwide β¦ WordPress Core Developer π£ TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.
β¨ As quoted by: Satya Nadella Β· CEO of Microsoft β Awais is an awesome example for developers.
π Leading developers and publishing technical content for over a decade π Loves his wife (Maedah) β― Read more about Ahmad Awais.
πβ¦ Awais is mostly active on Twitter @MrAhmadAwais
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