Ahmad Awais
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.
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.
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!
I talked about following parts of my life…
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.
Founder & CEO at Langbase.com · Ex VP DevRel Rapid · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. 🧑💻 AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor ❯ AI/ML Advisory Board member San Francisco, DevNetwork
🎩 Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate 🦊 Google Developers Expert Web DevRel 🚀 NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor 🏆 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 3x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer).
🌳 Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. 📟 Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation (100 videos · 22 Projects) & VSCode.pro course. Over 142 Million views, 22 yrs Blogging, 56K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.
✌️ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized by millions of developers worldwide ⓦ WordPress Core Developer 📣 TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.
✨ As quoted by: Satya Nadella · CEO of Microsoft — Awais is an awesome example for developers.
🙌 Leading developers and publishing technical content for over a decade 💜 Loves his wife (Maedah) ❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais.
👋… Awais is mostly active on Twitter @MrAhmadAwais
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