I'm Farhan, a dreamer escaping the dreamscape. Today, I share a brief of what I've been up to all this while.
What's up?
I'm 23 and here's what's up with me. I think I could've done better.
Started working as a Software Engineer at the age of 17(right out of high school) with a tiny startup a guy(a very good friend now) launched and needed someone to take over engineering from their part-time engineer who was moonlighting for them. I traveled 250km by bus to interview and then landed the job.
Some months later, I got admission into KNUST to study Computer Science. This was the only school I had applied to. I then entered this program and was working for the startup at the same time. After a year, the startup wanted to pivot and somehow ended up not working out so we had to shut down.
I was now in school focusing mainly on education and open-source. I was able to land contributions to the Gatsby JS Framework and the Refined Github browser extension. My curiosity about browser extensions started growing. I learnt how extensions were built by reading the unminified source code for an SEO browser extension just to figure out how they were doing their SEO magic.
Around this time, I signed up for fiverr.com and was offering browser extension development as a service just to improve my browser extension development skills. Some weeks later, I was messaged by someone to make a paid browser extension free for their usage. With browser extensions, the business logic mostly lives on the client's computer and it's quite hard to take that away from the client side. I spent approx. a week reading the source code and understanding everything in the extensions code just to crack it open with a modified version. After successfully doing that, I messaged this individual and got no response. Hence, I decided to message the company that had built this tool. After a long weird chat, they decided to give me a job at their place. This was my first time touching a very huge codebase. No, they didn't make me work on the browser extension but rather something way more complicated than that. I spent a year with them working on a cross-platform real-time application using Apache Cordova and Angular.
2nd year of University now, and I'm losing interest in school. The course outline is always amazing but the teaching is always trash. Lecturers are not present for an entire semester and exam questions are out of the scope of everything you've been taught the entire semester. I then made a decision to just pass my exams and then focus my time on improving my software skills.
COVID HAPPENS - Much of our lives was taken away from us... had cystic acne at this time. Prescribed a chemo drug by a dumb Doctor, faced mad side effects, and had some crazy existential thoughts. One amazing person helped me through
I then decided to go job hunting. Worked with several cool people and companies as a contractor.
- Adalytics.io - helped develop a tool that determines which Ad agency is tracking you on a given website. worked alongside a researcher.
- Fabric.so - I was on the initial team working on the proof of concept of a web annotation browser extension.
Also, I have done over 100 projects for people on Fiverr.com at this point. Some of them being
- Respectmart - built a browser extension that allowed people checkout their Amazon, eBay, Nike, BackMarket(and many more) carts through Respectmart.
- Tweet Sentiment - a browser extension that checks the sentiment of a tweet using a simple rule-based algorithm and then adds an emoji denoting the sentiment
- Subtitle Tranformer - a browser extension that extracts the subtitle of a video playing on the web, translates the subtitle to more than 10 other languages, and then updates the video with all the new subtitles.
- Shifter.io - worked on a proxy extension for shifter.io
... and many more
Then I joined Apago Inc(via Toptal) as a Senior Software Engineer to help push a project to completion. After that, I was kept and got the opportunity to lead 2 more projects from start to finish. My focus on school had reduced drastically but I was still getting good grades because I had discovered a cheat code for writing exams.
3months to graduation, I had an email from someone wanting me to join a company called Bardeen. I did a quick check on the company and they were working on an idea I had tried working on approx. 2year before then. I was damn excited. They also had some of the greatest programmers I've encountered and got the chance to work with so far. People from Ivy League schools and also Engineers from awesome companies like CERN. OMG, I was so freaking excited. An opportunity to learn from awesome minds. Even tho, the salary propossed was 50% less than what I was making at Apago, I assumed I was still young and knowledge was greater than everything else. I had to quit Apago in the middle of a project which was extremely sad.
I did 4 interviews with Bardeen and managed to pass them. I now had 30days to my first day at work with Bardeen. Within these 30days, I had Software Engineering Interviews with Microsoft and Amazon all in the same week with some days intervals. Guess what? I failed them all. Couldn't say much of this to anyone because it was a huge failure for me. I was so stressed out and my inferiority complex increased drastically. In these same 30 days, I did my final year defense at KNUST and was supposed to be a graduate but ended up not graduating because of an issue I had with 2 courses not being registered for the first semester of my final year.
I joined Bardeen, amazing people working on an amazing product I was so proud of. Instantly, I was invited to an offsite in Europe which was my first time leaving Africa. I had never dreamt of such a moment. It was amazing, meeting my colleagues in person for the first time in my career. damn! I've been living in the local optimum.
Fast-forward 9months later, I got laid off from Bardeen instantly without any notice. Funny enough, my 1-year visa to Europe got to me an hour after my layoff news. I assume I did something wrong or didn't meet their standards as a good engineer. That's fine. I was heartbroken but had to keep moving. As my Dad used to always say "As long as you're alive, you have hope".
After the layoff, I just kept traveling to Europe(making good use of my visa) to get myself exposed while blowing up the little money saved. I think exposure is a cue to doing amazing stuff. Damn! I had another Amazon Interview during my travel and failed it again. Why do these big interviews only happen to me when I'm mentally down? hmmm.
I've also been working on xtensio.io, A javascript framework for building browser extensions
What now?
I'm 23, and I lack a solid educational foundation as well as a firm footing in the field of software engineering. That's basically 0/2.
It's a marathon and not a race. I got the chance to meet a good friend for the first time in Berlin. A great programmer I look up to and somewhere in our conversations, he said he plans to give himself 5years to become the type of great engineer he wishes to be. I was like damn! this guy is years older than me and is giving himself 5years! so where am I in a rush to? Also, this is a guy who's very good than I am.
Now, my plan is to just hit the reset button. Restart as a software engineer, add more focus on AI/ML(something I've procrastinated for so long) and Entrepreneurship. Also, maybe fix my educational issues and try doing Grad school.