Won MongoDB Innovation Award: Front Line Heroes 2021 “corona-cli”

Front Line Heroes Award: Ahmad Awais for The “CORONA CLI” Project – Awais built a CLI command-line tool to track COVID-19 in March 2020. As COVID-19 spread, the project termed “corona-cli” became the number one trending repository on GitHub. To date, this project has served several billions of API requests making COVID stats accessible throughout the world with 53 different releases and extensive functionality built and contributed by 15+ developers.

Official announcement · MongoDB YouTube · 📰 Bloomberg: Eighth Annual MongoDB Innovation Award Winners Unveiled at MongoDB.Live 2021

The Story#

Well, I wouldn’t say I like to watch the news. So, when COVID hit — I was the last to learn that it’s something real. And then I started browsing things left and right — trying to find the most authentic resource to check COVID stats. Didn’t find anything. So, I decided to build one called corona-cli.

Little did I know it would go “viral” (no puns intended) and end up serving over 3 Billion API requests from all over the world. One of the most exciting use cases of this CLI was that a developer hooked it up to an LED in several hospitals. I was like whaaat?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This was before any COVID stats apps existed. Google was still working on creating something (remember when the president asked them to?) when my open-source COVID corona-cli got listed as one the most trending repository on GitHub. I was the #1 trending JavaScript developer on GitHub among 65M developers for a short while. It was a wild ride.

Jump to 2021, and I learned that my CLI project got nominated in the esteemed MongoDB Innovation Awards 2021 for the “Front line heroes” category. If you don’t know, MongoDB has a market cap of $37.72 Billion, and it’s the most famous NoSQL database company.

Humbled to share that I’ve won the MongoDB Innovation Award, just received it with an ultra-durable “world’s toughest” YETI Rambler Stainless Steel Vacuum Insulated black coffee mug. It has a sizable handle, and because it’s a Rambler, I’m getting the drinkware that knows how to take a beating and still retain temperature, no matter the conditions.

Remember to open-source your projects, even if you think they’re only helpful for you. I had had instances where I created a useful project by accident and didn’t know yet — when developers started using it, I’d realize “oh yes,” it can be used like that as well. That could be you.

Open source has a place for you…

When I shared the pictures of a gold GitHub Stars Award I received from GitHub — I got a lot of questions from the dev community on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook (and in groups like this, this, and this) about how to get started with open-source, how do I find time to do that and more.

There are so many projects that would value more contributors. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of documentation, community management, writing code, or something else — there’s always a place for you, for everyone.

If you find it hard to get started, I’d recommend you start by sharing bits and pieces of repeatable code snippets you write in more than one project. So many projects need help with documentation; if you’re a writer, you can contribute that way. No contribution is too small.

Use your code for good. Peace!