This is a story about how I fell in love with WordPress (and web) even after being misguided towards the career-path of Electrical Engineering and that of a jack of all trades, but WordPress community was where I found my true self.
▶ HeroPress#
Before I start writing this essay, I’d like to talk a little about HeroPress.
You see, I have been involved with this initiative for more than a year now. It was 23rd, January 2015 when I first posted about its Kickstarter campaign in the Advanced WordPress Facebook group. A few days later Matt Cromwell wrote a piece about Values and Pitfalls of HeroPress where we ended up with 200+ comments and a discussion about the name, i.e., HeroPress.
I won’t bore you with more details, but you can read about my views in the following screenshot.

🙈 My Confession#
Anywho, here we are — after a year — with 45+ fantastic HeroPress essays published. Topher has done a brilliant job of managing HeroPress. And he has been persistent in asking me to write an essay here.
But to be honest, I have had been trying to avoid it since I AM NO HERO.
I am just a regular full stack WordPress developer who loves to write, talk, build and share open source WordPress products.
I guess most of you don’t know that I am 24 years old — so, I don’t have that 30-years of experience or anything to share, but — I pride myself on being naturally keen and incessantly curious. You can always see me talking about the bleeding edge software and WP. I take a holistic approach towards software development and consider it a way of life. I crave leadership and envision collaboration over competition.
So, I am going to write my story — as I think of it — in the form of parts which represent different stages of my life. Before any of that, let me prefix the content of this post by confessing one more thing. I am not good at writing about myself. Maybe it’s the imposter syndrome. But thanks to Chris Lema, I’m changing!
🔥 My Life As An Open Source Developer#
I talked about following parts of my life…
- Part #1: Introduction to the Software World
- It All Started in Late 90’s
- The Movie
- Computer Software over Computer Games
- The Internet
- Yahoo GeoCities & HotMail
- Part #2: Introduction to Programming
- That Website I Built
- Mobile Development
- Forum Scripts: phpBB and vBulletin
- Building Websites
- Part #3: Graduation in Electrical Engineering
- Social Engine Websites
- Software Programming
- Blogging & Internet Marketing
- Design
- The Freelancer
- Whatever Happened to Electrical Engineering?
- Job or Entrepreneurship?
- Part #4: This Part of My Life Is Called … WordPress
- My Open Source Contributions
- What Does WordPress Mean to Me?
P.S. If you are struggling with a similar situation, where you want to adopt software development as a career, then don’t hesitate to contact me or reach out at Twitter (@mrahmadawais). I’ll aim to help everyone I can.