“There’s no shortcut to being successful. Put the time, and effort required, and if Allah wills it, you will get there.”
– Ahsan
Appforshare.io: Hello Ahsan, we are happy to have you on board with us. People know a lot about you and your journey as a software developer already, but we need to hear from you who is Ahsan and what he does?
Ahsan: Hey, glad to be in touch.
I’m Muhammad Ahsan and I’m a Software Architect and a Full-Stack JavaScript Engineer. I’ve been working in the Software Industry for about 9 years now, growing in different roles and working on different technologies. These days, I maintain quite a lot of open-source projects and apps I’ve created, I do live-streams on Twitch and Youtube while I’m learning and building different things, and also teach programming to fresh and intermediate engineers. Besides this, I’m also a Google acknowledged GDE (Google Developers Expert) and author of a worldwide published book called Angular Cookbook.
AFS: What motivated you to write a book? Do you see the developers adopting the techniques you’re explaining in the book?
Ahsan: I’m really glad that I get to know every now and then that someone bought my book (either PDF or hard copy) and sent me an email, or message, or via a Twitter DM that they’re enjoying the contents of the book and are learning a lot.
I’ve always enjoyed sharing knowledge. The core of my motivation for sharing knowledge is this hadith. As soon as I learn something, my brain goes into an auto-pilot mode in thinking if what I’ve learned is something others are willing to learn too, and how can I teach this in the most convenient way. That was also the motivation behind writing the book. I compiled my 8+ years of experience in the book, working on it in a time span of one year, putting more than 80 actionable recipes.
AFS: During the last year, Pakistani startups have made a mark globally as they have crossed $300m in funding. Which one do you think is the most promising startup for 2022 in terms of growth?
Ahsan: I’ve not personally followed the startup scene in Pakistan (being away of course), but I’ve heard great comments about Airlift and Bazaar. And I believe these two are quite promising.
AFS: We have seen you making videos from gaming to development, from teaching crucial programming to providing simple hacks. What one thing on which you get the most quality feedback?
Ahsan: Personally, I think my viewers are mostly beginners. And one thing consistent in the feedback of all of my videos is that they like the way I teach. As I come down to a beginner’s level to teach stuff like a parent teaches his/her child. You gotta be in it, to win it. In terms of numbers, I believe my Flutter videos are pretty popular (because of being one of the latest technologies), and my crash courses. People love those.
AFS: You have been working on the front end for a long time. What challenges have you faced as a front-end developer? Why do many of the developers try to run away from CSS?
Ahsan: It’s human nature to be afraid of something we don’t understand. Unless you train yourself to not be like that in situations, of course. I myself have been worried and scared of CSS at one point in my career. Probably when I was around 1 year in the industry. But as soon as I took the first step (spending time to learn it and to practice it), things became much easier for me. That’s what I do with everything I do now. I just jump into it, spend time learning, and I don’t stop until I’m either done with it or deprioritize it against something else.
AFS: Nowadays, a lot of tools have been reduced to make programming easier. What do you think about the future of web development? Do you think developers will adapt the No Code way?
Ahsan: Well, it doesn’t really matter. The thing is that new values, tools, paradigms are introduced every now and then. It is quite risky to jump to something new without totally understanding its pros, cons, and implications. As it is a risk, it can however be rewarding. I believe tools are going to be easier, but more possibilities will arise, requiring developers to be involved still. The methods may change, but those who have been in the industry learning the core of web development, and those who will learn those will never regret doing it.
AFS: Ahsan, congratulations on becoming a father. Tell us what has changed now in your 24 hours day activities? Are you thinking of adding programming as a basic skill in your child’s early education curriculum?
Ahsan: Haha, thanks, Alhamdulillah. I guess everything has changed. I’ve to think twice before opening my laptop, going to have a shower, thinking about going outside, and even about sleeping. I and my wife both have to abide by Muhammad Azlaan’s (my kid’s) schedule. What I do like is that it’s an absolutely amazing feeling of being a parent.
Regarding Muhammad Azlaan’s education, I do plan to get him involved in programming. However, his future would be completely up to him as programming is not the only thing that we’ll have in his curriculum 🙂 Let’s see how that goes.
AFS: Appforshare.io is a cloud-based platform that helps developers to upload the .apk or .ipa files for user acceptance testing for free. How do you find it useful for the developers? What do you advise us for our platform’s future growth?
Ahsan: At first look, the idea sounds cool. Good to see our own (Pakistani) alternative of the existing providers for app sharing. So I’m imagining that it is going to be super helpful for teams to share the files (especially if you’re maintaining versioning and channels).
Regarding the platform’s growth, the landing page can be modified to present the user the one thing they landed on the app for, ‘Uploading the .apk or .ipa’, eliminating the rest of the things from the view. That makes the user experience much smoother in my humble opinion. For the platform’s growth, you’d really have to listen to the customers’ needs and their feedback, tailored to what they require, and monitor the usage of your product in general. As I mentioned above, the ability of file versioning, and having different channels to share those apps is what I find supercritical for such a platform. All the best!
AFS: What are some of the contributions that you have made in Angular besides your book?
Ahsan: I’ve built a couple of Libraries including the NgXDeviceDetector which has now crossed over 6.5 million installs (woohoo). It’s fascinating to see that even only on GitHub, over 2800 projects use this library. Apart from this, I contributed to the Angular CLI repo (one of Angular’s core Repos) a couple of times. Some of my other libraries are Angular Year Calendar and Angular Deploy GHPages Actions. And I have a couple of Angular video tutorials in this YouTube Playlist. Besides this, I’ve given more than 30 talks in the span of the past 5 years related to Angular (both in Pakistan and internationally) and have mentored over 500 people.
AFS: If you are stuck on a deserted island and you are asked to keep only three things with you. What will be those three things?
Ahsan:
- Quran (with Urdu translation), to try to balance stuff while I can for the akhirah.
- A set of weapons (knives, swords, and guns) (might need it for the hunt)
- A big boat with an enormous amount of fuel (in case I plan to get out of there)
Thank you so much, Ahsan, for taking out time from your schedule with the added responsibilities of a little human. We love seeing you contributing and helping the community to grow. Thanks once again to be our guest.
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