Abe says, "Hello World."

Hey! Abe here.

I'm a twenty-six year old dude (I feel like anyone who refers to themselves as "dude" is uncool, and I've just shot myself in the foot right there) from Pakistan. I'm, well, I'm a lot of things and I'd like to get right into it.

When I was twenty-years old, I fell in love with writing and wanted to pursue it as a career. I didn't know how I'd make money from it, just that I wanted to. So I started looking up some ways to do that online.

I was just twenty-years old, as I mentioned, and on top of that I was and still am living in a third-world country, but hey, it's my country and in spite of all the crap, I still love it very much. Anyhoo, so I came across this content writing mill that paid you like a buck for writing five-hundred words.

See, I'm a bit of an idiot, a mule who believes in hard work instead of smart work. There's this awesome mentor that I have, Arslan Qamar Khan of AlphaSquad, who kept on telling me that I should both work hard and smart. He used to tell me that I was kinda wasting my potential in ghostwriting because I was writing like a 100,000 words long book for $2500, and let's be frank, that is wasting your potential to a degree. But at the same time, in my defense, I was young and stupid and wanted to make mistakes and being a ghostwriter allowed me to make those mistakes (at the expense of my clients, pun intended) and grow and learn and earn all at the same time.

In my further defense, I was putting in the grind, working my ass off at bettering my skills as a writer, and earning some good money on the side. Like, I live in Pakistan, which is a dirt cheap country, and I earned $1500 per month. I was practically a rupees millionaire. Still am. So, yeah.

Anyways, I still kept in touch with programming and developing and comp. sci. related pop culture like Silicon Valley, Mr. Robot, Betas, and like a ton of documentaries such as Triumph of the Nerds. Or was it Revenge of the Nerds? Earworm, earworm, "One foot in front of the other..."

Anyway, so when I turned twenty-six, I decided that I'd written enough for my clients. Now it's my time to a) write for my own self and b) get back into my field, i.e. comp. sci.

So I interviewed for a position at this really frikking prestigious firm in the heart of the capital of Pakistan, AlphaSquad, and I got myself a job as a business development lead. Why that in particular? Because in the five years that I'd been freelance ghostwriting, business development is the other main skill besides writing and editing that I learned.

So, yeah, and once that position was secure, I asked my boss, the same guy who's my amazing mentor, Arslan Qamar Khan (whom I lovingly call Bossman), about web development, and he, being the awesome mentor that he is, agreed to teach me web development from scratch. The guy's a frikking coding genius, having worked on more than 1500 projects in the past 16 years, and he's worked with many, many Fortune 500 clients like Toyota North America, Comcast, SCTE, Warner Bros, and Premier Ortho.

So, last week, I started my masterclass with Bossman, and had him guide me through my web development path.

So, I'm essentially learning the MERN stack, focusing particularly on React and React Native, but that's still a long, long way off.

I'm starting with the basics, and before any of you says something like, "Ooh, you're getting started at twenty-six," need I remind you that there's no age too late to start learning something. Cradle to the grave, as it were.

So, the first thing he told me to do was basic HTML. Now, you'll be thinking to yourself that basic HTML is quite basic, but here's the thing that Bossman taught me: Always be a beginner because when you say that you know a lot and that you've learned quite a lot, that's when you stop learning. So, always consider yourself a noob, Bossman said, and that's what I am. An absolute noob. And I am not even ashamed about it. I'm switching careers like chameleons change colors, like snakes shed their skin, in that for the past five years I was a ghostwriter and then one day I up and join this firm as a business developer lead, and the week after that I'm technical training for a full-stack developer position at the same firm.

I was a bit confuddled as to where to go and what to learn, so I just searched HTML Crash Course and came across this really awesome dude, Brad Traversy, on YouTube and I just frikking fell in love with the way he taught what he taught. I ended up watching like a ton of his videos and I can now say that I somewhat know my way around basic HTML. I made two landing pages, which for a beginner like me is quite awesome an achievement. Or maybe that's just me. I don't know crap about realtime, adult world development, and I'd love to wear the big boy pants and everything, but I have to stick to the basics. Another thing that Bossman told me to learn was Semantic HTML and Performance and Optimization.

Then we moved on to CSS, Flexbox, and Grid. To be really frank with you, I still haven't covered that but the moment I do, I'll let you know. I intend to post daily here.

Bossman also introduced me to different frameworks for CSS (correct me if I'm wrong) such as Semantic UI, Bootstrap, TailwindCSS, and like a couple of others.

But the one that blew my pants away was Tailwind.

I've got holes in my hands (don't even make a joke about Jesus) when it comes to money, and so I spent like some bucks on buying this amazing UI Kit called Tailwind UI Kit, or TUK for short. You can check it out at tuk.dev

So I bought a license, got myself acquainted with it, and then I used it to make a landing page, and man, I'm not even kidding you, from two hours of grind I was down to two minutes! Me! A noob! I made a frikking landing page in two minutes! TUK, or Tailwind UI Kit, has got more than 350 components and more than 10 templates that you can work with and integrate them to your website.

I intend to make detailed guides about them. This is just my introduction first post and all.

Now let's talk about non-technical stuff, shall we? I absolutely adore the hell out of Stephen King, I love gaming (PlayStation over Xbox, don't @ me), and I binge the f**k out of shows when I'm in the mood (and I'm really, really moody), and when I'm utterly and completely free, I read a lot. Catcher in the Rye is my favorite book (again, don't even @ me), and I love reading poetry as well. Bukowski clan all the way. My favorite short story writer is Raymond Carver.

I am always listening to music. Always. CHRVCHES and Krewella are my two favorite bands. Shamoon Ismail is my favorite Pakistani underground singer. I love the Pakistani music scene. Just love it.

So, I think that's quite exhaustive a first-post, don't you think? I'd love, love, love to connect with fellow beginners and get the ball rolling and the talk percolating.

Let's chat in the comments, my brothers and sisters and my friends from other genders.

Peace from the East!