Abdurrahman Rajab

Posted on Jan 9

2023 Reflection: a pivotal year for the open source journey

#career #opensource #productivity #learning

Reflecting on your time, year, and week would help you understand what you have achieved and learn more about yourself by recognizing the major and minor things you have encountered. I am writing this post to review the lessons I learned last year. I will add November and December 2022 in this review since those months greatly impacted my journey during 2023.

I decided to name the year as pivotal since it impacted my journey in working and gave me a wider angle to look at open source, work management, and a few other topics that will play an important role in the future.

Events

GitHub Universe 2022

In November 2022, as a part of the GitHub Campus Expert program, the GitHub Education team invited me to join the GitHub Universe conference. During the GitHub universe, I had the pleasure of meeting awesome open-source maintainers, Campus Experts, and GitHub VPs like Martin Woodward and Stormy Peters.

The whole Universe experience is really interesting and inspiring. I will need to write a blog about it only. Yet, the most important thing is the ability to network with other Campus Experts and meet great people like Ahmad Awais, which will hugely impact my 2023 year!

Networking in the Universe has allowed me to understand myself more, overcome imposter syndrome (somehow), and even unlock a few opportunities in 2023.

TV Interviews

After the GitHub Universe, I had a friend who pushed me to get on TV to talk about my experience at the Universe. Such a push unlocked the door for me to have other TV interviews with different TV channels, like the Turkish National Channel, Yemeni Channel, and Syrian Channel. During these interviews, I had the chance to share my thoughts and talk about my experience in programming, AI, and the Universe conference.
If you are curious about the TV channels and the topic I covered, here is a short information about them and the topic list.

As for channels, I have been hosted in the following:

TRT Arabic: which is Turkish national TV focusing on the Arab-speaking people.
Syria TV: A Syrian independent TV channel that focuses focusing the the country
Balqees TV: A Yemeni channel covering Yemen news and technology advancement. Run by the Nobel Prize for Peace winner Tawakkol Karman.

During those TV interviews, I covered the following topics:

The GitHub Universe 2022 experience
The value of open source contributions to developing countries
The value of AI research and ChatGPT
Technology Privacy
How AI will impact humans
Teaching programming for children in the AI age
Metaverse as a new technology and its impact on people
The security of wearable devices
The value of AR/VR in different fields, medicine, science and mechanics

Being on TV in my twenties was not something I expected yet; it’s really helpful and interesting to be exposed to such an area and make related connections.

Career

Regarding my career, I had the chance to work in two great companies. The first is RapidAPI, and the second is Unify.ai, a YC company with an ambitious mission and founder that aims to unify the fragmented AI.

During my work with them, I improved my experience in writing communication in a fully async remote environment. This helped shape my thoughts about engineering management and the type of work that we have. I have written a summary of my career in general, which you can find in this link.

This year's only downside is that unify.ai/ivy had layoffs for almost 50% of the workers, which affected me. With that, I again started my job hunting journey at the end of 2023!

If you got curious about the career journey, feel free to read the full version from this link

Education

Regarding Education, I am continuing my master's degree in Computer Engineering. During this year, I had great exposure to different concepts and principles in engineering, like Cyber Security, Fuzzy logic, and more. I want to write a blog about this exposure in the next few weeks.

Doing a master's at university will help me get a bit of exposure to the research community in academics and help me get experience in research and writing papers, which, in my thoughts, will increase the value of research over time. The other thing I might achieve while doing a research master's is understanding the gap between academia and industry and having a different perspective.

Hadith Tech

This year, hadith tech has played a vital role in my experience. I have hosted some awesome people in the podcast that have shaped my thoughts about open source and empowered me with the related mindset to contribute to open source. This contribution has sharpened my skills, enabled me to work on personal projects, and even have a few friends from the open-source community!

Besides that, open source enabled me to work with Unify.ai and get experience that would only be limited to specific regions and senior people. The open source enables you to get into that knowledge without holding it in a small group of people in a specific geographical position.

Here is a list of the episodes that I had in Hadith Tech this year:

English:

Matthew Mirman - Anarchy Founder - Link
Abubakar Abid - Gradio Founder and Machine Learning lead at Hugging Face - Link
Olabode Lawal-Shittabey - Open Source Engineer - Link
Nick Taylor - Senior Software Engineer at OpenSauced - Link
Elena Lape - Holopin Founder - Link
Rishit Dagli - Machine Learning Researcher at Civo - Link
Federico Grandi - Open Source Engineer - Link
Forest Anderson - Open Source Engineer - Link
Daniel Lenton - Unify.ai Founder - Link
Megan Kaczanowski - Cybersecurity Professional at clearme.com - Link
Brian Douglas - OpenSauced Founder - Link

Arabic:

Faris Masad - Replit Co-founder - Link
Taha Zuhair - DevOps Engineer at Efficy - Link
Joe Hakim Rahme - Quality Engineering Manager at RedHat - Link
Mohammad Khair - Principal Engineer at GE HealthCare - Link
Thamood Mahfuz - Producer at Thamanyah - Link

You can check the full videos from this link.

Open Source:

With my experience in the universe and touching on the value of open source, I have gotten more involved in open source this year. I started by contributing to other projects. The idea is that I needed to get out of my comfort zone and project hell and have experience with projects that have multiple contributors. For that, I have contributed to OpenSauced and Cal.com over the years and had multiple other minor contributions that could be considered.

Doing this allowed me to meet great people, connect with a larger community, and build friendships worldwide. I was pleased to meet awesome developers from Nigeria, Senegal, The USA, Canada, and more!

Connecting with the wider community is just a gift that I got from open source!

Experiments

Over the years, I have done multiple experiments to improve myself and optimize productivity. Here, I am going to share some of the experiences that I had and the results I got.

30 days of open source

In this experience, I had a goal to start with open source. The main goal was to get comfortable contributing and adding value to projects. I have been involved in open source for a while but never contributed to projects for the long term, which is my main goal while doing this experiment.

This improved my skills as a software engineer, exposed technologies that would be hard to do alone, and even showed me how some great projects run and what I could expect from the open-source community.

I still remember the first time I contributed to Open Sauced, which made me meet Takanome-dev and learn from him how to read and understand the contributor's guide. Besides that, I remember when I first contributed to cal.com and learned tailwind from them because someone from the community jumped in and showed me direction. This experience would not be possible without having great people in an open-source and collaborative environment. At the same time, I would not be able to do that If I did not tackle my fear or had the imposter syndrome of being afraid to work on an established project.

30 days of live streams

The second experiment that I had was doing 30 days of live streams without having a goal. This enabled me to contribute to projects and make friends from a different channel. At the same time, such a stream helped me to have a couple of pair programming sessions with the open-source community.

The streams built the habit of going live spontaneously, learning more about streaming and how to use software, and even going forward without any expectations! The only goal for me was to add value and not expect any results in the short term, which helped me not get disappointed or have a breakdown while doing them.

1 hour of daily open-source.

For the one hour of open source, I decided to do it with the live streams. Combining two goals in one work was a great experience. This helped me to be consistent with my work and have an accountability system. Over time, this system helped me to have the first Chrome extension project I worked on, an emoji menu Chrome extension.

The idea of the extension came while doing a stream and went on the learning journey live. This required me to think about the audience and explain my thoughts while coding.

Digital Garden: Second brain, etc

One of the important things in being with communities is getting exposure to new ideas, seeing how it works, and what you could do for that. I encountered the concept of the digital garden for the first time while in a discussion in the GitHub Campus Expert community. This ignited my curiosity to explore the concept and learn how to adapt it to my needs.

I am still hesitant with the concept, yet I believe it is a great way to share your thoughts and ideas and enable you to be a creative human rather than a production machine!

I played around with the concept and tried obsidian but did not move forward since I was hesitant about what could be public and private. Yet, I feel that I am overthinking the situation, and it would be great to just jump into that and publish the ideas and thoughts I have in my digital garden and grow them over time.

2024 goals!

My goals for 2024 would be to establish a better system for myself to follow and be able to contribute more to open source and community through that system. The main idea of having a system is that it would enable me to have better access and reach. I'm unsure how that would happen, but I will figure it out over time.

Besides having the system, I plan to continue doing the Hadith Tech podcast and run a project or two next year to reach financial stability or even work with a good company since I was affected by the end-of-the-year layoffs.