Ahmad Awais

Ahmad Awais is an award-winning open-source engineering leader. His software serves millions of developers. Code he wrote went to Mars.

“What an awesome example for developers,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, in his MSInspire keynote — featuring Awais as one of the code contributors to NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter mission. (Source: https://Awais.dev/marsc)

“Pakistani developers are truly making their mark in the world,” said the US Embassy (Isb.) when highlighting Awais’s global software contributions. (Source: https://Awais.dev/usetweet)

Ahmad Awais is the VP of Developer Relations as part of the Executive Leadership Team at RapidAPI (over $272.5MM in funding a $1 Billion valuation from Microsoft Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Stripes, Soft Bank VF 2, and other investors with headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley — RapidAPI is the world’s largest API Hub with four million developers and 40,000+ APIs. 100+ employees https://Awais.dev/RapidAPI).

Under his supervision, the DevRel, Dev Experience Engineering, Docs & Developer Content teams have built the most engaged API Developers community with millions of developers and launched a new DevRel Learn APIs platform from the ground up. Over 80 million developers read, viewed, and learned from this content in less than two years. He has helped several businesses make products with developer-led growth.

Awais has authored hundreds of open-source software tools used by over three million developers worldwide. For example, his Shades of Purple code theme is one of the famous top ten dark code themes. He has open-sourced over a hundred automation CLI software (https://Awais.dev/GitHub).

His code contribution to NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter mission was featured on Mashable, Geo TV, Hello Mag, and dozens of media publications (https://Awais.dev/press).

Awais built a CLI command-line tool to track COVID-19 in March 2020. This project has served several billions of API requests making COVID stats accessible over 3.1 Billion times worldwide.

His projects have had an extensive global impact. Not exactly rocket science. Not exactly novel. But very powerful. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB ($30B Market Cap.), awarded the esteemed “Front Line Heroes Award” to Awais for his work on the corona-cli project during the pandemic (featured on Bloomberg, Business Insider, and more at https://Awais.dev/press).

Awais received the FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) community leadership recognition as the 8th Gold GitHub Stars Award recipient out of 65M Developers. He was also listed #1 JavaScript “Trending Developer” worldwide by GitHub.

His open-source software has received several awards: like the Automattic Design Trophy presented by John Maeda (MIT Media Labs ex-Professor, called the “Steve Jobs of academia” by Forbes).

“It’s very impressive!” said — Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, as he asked for a round of applause in his SOTW keynote for Awais’s 13+ years of software contributions to the WordPress Dev Community.

Google recognized Awais as a “Google Developers Expert” (for three consecutive years, one of the five GDEs from Pakistan at the time). He was invited as a speaker for the GDE Global Summit with a sponsored US Google HQ trip.

Ahmad Awais has been involved in several major tech communities and primarily open-source software governance initiatives as listed below:

• Business Governance Board voting member at the Linux Foundation, OpenJS Foundation (Node.js project) & OpenAPI Initiative.
• Voting member of Node.js Community Committee, OpenJS Foundation. An honor currently extended to only 11 people worldwide. Node.js Community Committee Outreach Lead.
• DigitalOcean Navigator (one of the first three worldwide)
• WordPress Core​ Developer with contributions in 10+ major versions to core software that empowers 42.6% of all websites.
• Ex-VP ​of ​Engineering​​ at WGA: Managed a team of 11 managers and 33 developers. Led Engineering, DevOps, and Operations for enterprise clients like Network Solutions, Audi AG, Coca-Cola Global.

​Awais comes from a family of teachers and ​loves to teach code. Over 26,532 developers are learning from his courses, i.e., NodeCLI.com, VSCode.pro,​ NextjsBeginner.com​​. He has also contributed over ten thousand free copies of premium courses and books to emerging developer communities in Africa (Nigeria, Ghana) and Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh).

Awais is an accomplished keynote speaker with 100+ talks at sizable tech conferences, including TEDx, ReactLive, Concatenate Conf, DevWeek NYC, Node Summit, Google Dev Summit, Next.js Conf, and more. ​(More at https://Awais.dev/talks).

He is a member of the SmashingMagazine Experts Panel, a featured & published author at CSS-Tricks, Tuts+, Scotch.io, and SitePoint, and wrote 100+ extensive in-depth technical long-form guides in several international tech magazines.

Ahmad Awais is an established voice in the developer community: Verified tech-blogger Twitter account (https://twitter.com/MrAhmadAwais) with 47,500+ followers, 4.8 Million monthly blog views (21yrs of blogging), 156K+ subscribers, 11.5M answer-views on StackOverflow, and 18,919+ GitHub followers/stargazers. Over 81,783 followers across social media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube.

All the community work Awais does is because of his unfettered ability to share everything he knows. Driven by the purpose of helping millions of developers make software that onboards the next billion internet users — and make the web accessible to everyone.

Resources#

Maybe you’re looking for the following:

• Courses and books →
  List of professional courses and books by Ahmad Awais
• Talks, Conferences, Workshops →
  List of talks and other speaking engagements by Ahmad Awais
• Newsletter →
  The Developer Takeaway newsletter by Ahmad Awais
• Uses page →
  A list of software & hardware products used by Ahmad Awais
• Speaker Bio and Press Kit →
  Includes up-to-date bio, links, and images of Ahmad Awais
• Press Mentions, Media Coverage, Awards →
  A non-exhaustive list of press, media coverage, and awards
• Contact / Email →
  The best way to get in touch with Ahmad Awais