0:00

He used to encourage that people don't

0:02

just go home and leave

0:04

their laptop, go home. Like he used to say that laptop

0:07

should be a part of your body at

0:09

that time. So

0:11

he used to say that. And then

0:14

I was spending like almost like till 1 a.m. in

0:16

the office, we were sitting there. We were basically living

0:18

there. So he was like a family member. So.

0:21

Welcome back to the

0:23

Freeco Camp Podcast. I'm

0:49

Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of

0:51

freecocamp.org. Each week we're

0:54

bringing you insight from developers, founders

0:56

and ambitious people getting into tech.

0:58

This week we're talking with Kamrad

1:01

Ahmed. He's a software engineer and

1:03

founder of Roadmap.sh, which

1:05

has skill tree roadmaps for lots

1:07

of developer fields such as DevOps.

1:10

As a teacher, he's also a

1:12

Google developer expert and a GitHub star.

1:15

Kamrad, it's a pleasure to have you here, man. Thank

1:18

you for having me, Quincy. Yeah, and

1:20

I'm a long time fan of yours

1:22

and of Roadmap.sh. I've

1:24

written articles about how cool these visual

1:27

roadmaps of different skills you should acquire as

1:29

a developer, like depending on which fields you

1:31

want to go into. These are super useful.

1:34

So. I'm a

1:36

big fan of Freeco Camp as well. I mean,

1:38

I came across it long time ago, like after

1:40

one year of launching Roadmap. And

1:44

I came across by a comment

1:46

on Reddit, someone mentioned that go take

1:48

a roadmap from Roadmap.sh and

1:50

learn from Freeco Camp. It's good

1:52

that I came across it later. I otherwise I

1:54

might not have launched Roadmap. I mean, Freeco Camp

1:56

was already there. It was a good enough resource.

1:59

I didn't know that. that there is something like Free

2:01

Code Camp. Yeah, well,

2:03

thank you. I feel

2:05

very honored that you

2:07

know about Free Code Camp that you've, that you

2:10

saw value in it. And yeah,

2:12

Free Code Camp, of course, being a big work

2:14

in progress, Free Code Camp just focusing on

2:16

a few key skills with our core curriculum. Roadmap.sh

2:19

has a broad category

2:22

of different careers that

2:24

you can potentially pursue, right? You've

2:26

got, how many

2:28

different career specializations do you have

2:31

represented with Roadmap? So we

2:33

have two types of Roadmaps, role based and skill based.

2:35

In total, we have around 55. I

2:38

don't know the exact number of the role based and skill based, but

2:40

total 55. Okay, so at

2:42

least probably 20 or so different developer

2:44

careers. Can you give some examples of

2:46

some careers that people might pursue? Front

2:49

and back end DevOps, full stack,

2:52

QA, UX Designer,

2:54

Cyber Security, product management, DevRel, technical

2:56

writing, and there are many others

2:58

as well. But yeah, off the

3:00

top of my head. Yeah,

3:02

that's amazing. There's just

3:05

a wide variety of different

3:07

fields people can go into with their

3:09

coding skills. And some of

3:11

those skills that you, some of those

3:13

fields you mentioned are very multidisciplinary

3:15

as well, like technical writing or like

3:17

user experience design that bring in, you

3:19

know, potentially like, you know,

3:21

cognitive psychology, they bring in research,

3:26

methodology, like all kinds of different exciting

3:28

stuff. So the

3:30

thing that I guess one of the big messages

3:32

that I have for people who are considering,

3:35

you know, a career in 2024, 2025 is think about what you can do

3:41

with those coding skills. Coding is

3:44

a skill. It's not a career in itself.

3:46

It's one of many skills that you will

3:48

need to succeed as a software

3:50

engineer, as a designer, as

3:52

a mechanical engineer or an

3:54

electrical engineer or doing

3:57

like working with AI systems.

4:00

Even a lot of people in government should

4:02

probably learn how to build systems because

4:04

they have to help figure out how to regulate

4:06

them, for example. So I

4:09

love that you've got these detailed progressions

4:11

of skills and you've kind of thought

4:13

about dependencies. You've thought about what

4:15

the prerequisite should be for doing

4:17

things. Can you talk about Roadmap? And

4:20

anybody who hasn't been there before, you can of course go to

4:22

roadmap.sh and you can check out what

4:25

these look like. But they look

4:27

kind of like those balsamic markups,

4:30

like you used to be able to make mocks. I

4:32

guess the song is probably still around. You can make mocks.

4:34

A lot of people use Figma now, but it's like

4:37

nice little boxes and arrows

4:39

and things like that. Almost kind of

4:41

like UML or something like that, where

4:43

you're like pointing to relationships between different things

4:46

and forking paths and things like that. So

4:50

yeah, Roadmap provides a learning path for developers. So

4:52

this is the tagline, learning path for developers. So

4:54

we are a community-driven project, 55 plus

4:57

Roadmaps. We have already, there are two types of

4:59

Roadmaps, role-based and skill-based. Role-based, for

5:01

example, if you want to become a front-end developer,

5:03

back-end developer, DevOps, or whatever role do you want

5:05

to take? What are the steps you can

5:07

take? What are the skills that you should acquire? What are the

5:10

things that you should learn? So this is the

5:12

path, the visual hierarchy of different steps.

5:14

And the second thing we have is also when you click

5:16

a node, we give you the resources. So

5:18

we might be linking to free code, can videos that

5:20

you might have there, some external free courses on YouTube,

5:23

free books. So we have a lot of free resources in

5:26

the Roadmap. So we don't just give you a path. We

5:28

also link to the external resources to

5:30

help you go and pick them up on

5:32

the internet. So this is the Roadmap

5:35

part. The next thing we learned recently is the

5:37

projects. So mostly learning

5:39

just by reading or watching a tutorial is not

5:41

enough. You need to build a lot of projects. So

5:44

we started adding projects to most of our Roadmaps.

5:46

So we started with the most famous Roadmaps.

5:49

Back-end Roadmap is done. So we have around 20, 22 projects

5:51

in there. So

5:53

when you're learning, go and do the beginner-specific project first,

5:55

then do the intermediate points, and then the senior ones.

5:58

And then we also have the community submissions in there. there

6:00

so you can go and check like how someone

6:02

else solved this problem so if you get stuck

6:04

you can get the idea from there. Yesterday

6:07

we joined the frontend project so this is also there.

6:09

Apart from this we also have guides we write

6:12

like we from time to time we write a

6:14

lot of technical articles as well we have some

6:16

YouTube videos as well and

6:19

we have questions so we have six questions so

6:21

far at the moment like let's say that you

6:23

are a frontend developer you need to test yourself

6:25

how good you are at frontend so you can

6:27

go and answer the question and see

6:30

how if you know that know it properly or not. So

6:33

yeah in a nutshell this is that the next thing we

6:35

have is also login and registration so you can log in

6:38

while you're following a roadmap you

6:40

can track your progress in there interact with other

6:42

developers who are learning the same thing apart

6:45

from this what you can do you also have a

6:47

public profile so you can share your kind

6:50

of a resume with other other like potential employers

6:52

or anyone to see that I'm learning this is

6:54

this so this is what my expertise look like

6:56

independent backend or DevOps or whatever it is yeah

6:59

that's also there and then we also have teams

7:01

that we recently launched so teams can also use

7:03

roadmap for their internal employees as well to track

7:05

their progress and stuff. Awesome wow

7:08

you're building on a lot of stuff that is like I

7:10

can imagine it being super useful like we have people

7:12

all the time who are like hey how can our team

7:14

use free code campaign we're like eventually we'll have a public

7:17

API that you can use or we'll have

7:20

like some sort of enterprise solution or whatever

7:22

but like that's on our literal roadmap but

7:25

it seems like you're just going out and you're

7:27

doing these things so that's very impressive I

7:31

want to delve a little bit into the fact that

7:33

this is an open source project right like you created

7:35

this you put everything out there everything's free as far

7:38

as I can tell like I've never seen like any

7:40

sort of like pay for roadmap like everything

7:43

is just freely out there and people

7:45

can just grab this and use it

7:47

and your open source projects are incredibly

7:49

well received by the developer community you

7:51

have I think some of the biggest

7:53

projects on github in terms of like

7:55

I think I read that

7:58

you had more than a thousand contributors

8:00

to these over open source?

8:03

Yeah, on Roadmap alone we have more than 1000 contributors in

8:07

total. Yeah, so in terms of number of stars

8:09

on my GitHub projects, I am the second person

8:12

on GitHub with more stars. And

8:15

yeah, I have like some quite famous, like for example,

8:17

the driver.js which has been downloaded by two and

8:19

a half million users, it

8:22

has like 50-60,000 downloads per week. And then

8:24

I have similar design patterns for

8:26

humans, which is a textual guide with almost 45,000 stars.

8:29

And some others like more than 10-15,000 stars on each. Wow. So

8:33

you're doing a lot of stuff beyond just

8:35

Roadmap, like design patterns for humans. Sounds like

8:37

it's kind of like a book on GitHub.

8:41

Yeah, so it is just a big markdown file. So

8:43

it was supposed to be a book on the side,

8:45

but I decided to put it on GitHub. So it's

8:47

just big markdown file with examples and textual descriptions of

8:49

design patterns. Awesome. I'm going to link

8:51

to that in the description as well because a lot

8:54

of people ask me all the time, like how can

8:56

I learn design patterns? So

8:59

I added that to my notes for the

9:01

show notes. By the way, everybody listening,

9:04

if you're watching on YouTube, of course, we've

9:06

got the video description. I'll have

9:08

a lot of information there. If you're listening to

9:10

the RSS feed like I do on, you know,

9:13

Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you're listening,

9:15

your podcast tool of choice,

9:18

be sure to check out the show notes there

9:20

as well. So we'll have lots of helpful links

9:23

there. So come on. I want to dive

9:25

into your background first because you have

9:27

a very unique, like international background.

9:30

You're like an international man of mystery

9:32

traveling around, working in all these different,

9:34

in all these different countries, in all

9:36

these different cultures. My understanding is you're

9:38

originally from Pakistan and that

9:40

you've just kind of branched out from there

9:43

across Asia and Europe. Can you talk about

9:45

your career progression? Maybe we can even go

9:48

back to like your early

9:50

days and how you got interested in programming

9:52

and technology. So I

9:54

had my first computer around, I think, when I was

9:57

9, 10 years old, but it was not for programming. I was

9:59

mostly gaming. My father had it so I was just using

10:01

it for playing games and stuff. Programming

10:03

I was, I mean I never tried programming at

10:05

all. I was doing some kind of design work

10:07

and stuff before. Just as an experiment for fun.

10:11

I started with programming around 2010. So

10:14

when I got the admission in the university

10:16

in software engineering. So my graduation

10:18

year was from 2010 to 2014. I

10:21

graduated in software engineering. But it

10:23

was a small university back in a small

10:25

city in Pakistan called Pascabad. I

10:28

still consider myself to be self taught because

10:31

the curriculum there was pretty outdated. They don't train you

10:33

to be like how to get a job or how

10:35

do you go out and what do you need to

10:37

work on and so on. So this

10:39

was my graduation year. I started with open source around 2012,

10:41

11, 12. We'll

10:45

get into that later. But yeah, so

10:47

I got into that at that time. And

10:49

then my first job was around 2013 when

10:51

I was in sixth semester. So

10:54

it was summer break. I decided to just print

10:56

out resumes like 50 copies of my resume. And

10:59

I was learning a lot of different things. I had

11:01

HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I mean, I had that. I

11:03

was learning about game development at that time, Unity 3D.

11:06

I learned about C sharp, graphics designing. So whatever I

11:08

could think of, I was just doing it. I was

11:10

learning because there was no one to teach me like

11:12

what you should be doing after you graduate. So

11:15

I had this big three page resume. Imagine if

11:17

you're just a fresh M&U, haven't graduated yet and

11:19

you have this three page resume. So

11:21

I had the three page resume. I printed 50 copies of it. And

11:24

then I opened Google map and site software

11:26

companies in Fazlava. I took my

11:28

boat and a bike out. And then I went to all

11:30

of these, all these companies. And then I

11:32

decided to drop my resume there one

11:34

by one. Most of them just said that put your

11:36

resume here. We'll get back to you if you have

11:38

an opening. One small company, there were

11:40

like three or four people sitting in a small room

11:42

in there. So they decided to interview me. And

11:45

then they asked me like, what do you know? I

11:47

tell them everything that I know about C sharp, SQL,

11:50

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or whatever. They

11:52

were really interested in the web design. So they said that

11:54

we are building this, they were

11:56

building this business management. It's

42:00

probably impossible to imagine how instrumental node.js came

42:02

became to the web at this point But

42:04

you were right there at the in the

42:06

early days and you were one of the

42:09

first Devs to take a crack at really

42:11

learning it and using it. Yeah,

42:13

it used to be HTML CSS

42:15

JavaScript JQD PHP and Angular Georgia

42:17

and gorgeous there was also

42:19

like some framers the awesome frameworks, but they

42:21

were not as famous extension and all this

42:25

But yeah there was mainly front-end used to be

42:27

jQuery boost app and Back-end used

42:29

to be PHP node.js was getting like it was

42:31

still like it was coming in the market at

42:33

that time There were not

42:36

many tutorials out there like most of the people

42:38

were like showing you how to build the IO

42:40

application that you can't do with like IO heavy

42:42

applications like that You can't do easily with PHP

42:44

like chat application and things

42:46

like that. So my Like

42:49

I had done some experiments with

42:51

node.js like I build a chat chatting application

42:53

like chat server with node.js at the time

42:56

But I did not know much So we had

42:58

the interview As I said, like

43:00

he was also a PHP developer who was trying to

43:02

build this with node.js And then he

43:04

said that I know also PHP we have some projects in

43:06

PHP Let's do the call and then they decided

43:09

to give me a job The he

43:11

liked my blog and stuff and then

43:13

he said that fine. We'll give you a job So

43:16

he gave me the offer this offer was 13,000 at

43:19

that time 13,000 at that

43:21

time was almost like four five thousand dollar

43:23

per month I was making at that

43:25

time. They gave me a bump. I was making 75,000 rupees

43:28

at that time. So this was a huge

43:30

salary bump So

43:33

at the moment I thought that this is scam, but they're

43:35

giving me this my salary Almost like

43:37

three four times bigger than my current salary. They

43:39

don't have a website Yeah, so maybe they just

43:41

want to get me there or whatever Very

43:46

common, yeah, unfortunately Yeah in

43:48

a lot of a lot of countries a lot of

43:52

Talented people travel abroad and next

43:54

thing you know, they're in like a pig slaughtering scam

43:56

or something like that, right? But

43:58

but this predated Allow

56:00

themselves for you to travel for example or for

56:03

your family and so on. It was super big.

56:05

They really took care of their employees. I

56:08

said no to them but then I

56:11

gave it a thought and I was thinking that if

56:13

I stay here like what am I doing like I'm

56:15

just spending like one or two tickets per spend there's

56:17

nothing like in this eight months what is the significant

56:19

contribution that I've done after I

56:21

leave the job in my next job what would I say

56:23

like what did I do I was just a small piece

56:25

in this bigger machine what is my contribution? I

56:29

think you just identified like one of the traps that

56:31

a lot of developers fall into. I meet developers all

56:33

the time who kind of plateaued or stagnated in their

56:36

career growth and they're in that

56:38

position like you they have like a company

56:40

car maybe I've never had a company car

56:42

but they've got like all these different things

56:44

that are like just making them comfortable and

56:46

they they're good at doing what they do

56:48

they their management doesn't know how to do

56:50

it it's not easy to replace them they're just they can

56:52

just kind of chill there and take it

56:54

easy but what happens next

56:57

like like their skills are atrophying

56:59

their energy level is atrophying their

57:01

ability to go and learn an

57:03

entire new framework or an entire

57:05

new database system or something like

57:07

that is atrophying with every passing

57:10

year that they are resting on

57:12

their laurels and and so it sounds

57:14

like you identified that this

57:16

might be what would

57:18

happen to you if you just got too comfortable

57:22

yep and the other thing I thought about like

57:24

in the next job in the resume in the

57:26

interview what would I tell

57:28

like what is the contribution that I had like what

57:30

did I do there I just built some forms built

57:32

some apis the simple crowd what did I do like

57:34

what was my significant impact because there were people sitting

57:37

there for ages like six years of experience in the

57:39

same company ten years of experience in the same company

57:41

so they used to be there I thought that can

57:43

I go up next level am I going to be

57:45

here all all my life should I do that do

57:48

you want do I want that or so

57:50

I gave it a thought and I said no I don't want that

57:52

then I decided to join the next this

57:54

next company go with them so they had this challenge

57:57

of launching this platform within 100 days if they were

57:59

able to do it they will secure the funding and

58:01

then they can keep on working with them. If

58:03

they don't do it, then it's gone. I didn't know

58:05

that if I knew that I would have never left,

58:08

but like you, for me, uh, we were able to launch the

58:10

platform in a hundred days. We were able to secure the funding

58:12

and kept on working with the government. And

58:15

we built this Alibaba, uh,

58:17

competitor in there. I got to learn

58:19

a lot again, because

58:22

we did not repeat the same mistakes that we

58:24

were making in my previous company, but there were

58:26

different mistakes and different kinds of learnings. There was

58:28

no power team. There was no design team. There

58:30

was no, uh, Q is everything

58:32

was supposed to go to be built from design to

58:35

development to launch and everything was supposed to be done

58:37

by us. Like me, my CTO and,

58:39

uh, and to that kinds of further. So

58:41

just go build Alibaba. No big deal. Three

58:45

people, four people. So yeah,

58:47

no, I mean, they promised that we'd hire on the MEP.

58:49

So what is going to be the initial launch? So initial

58:51

launch was supposed to be just upload

58:53

the products. People can search. They

58:55

could submit a form and this comes back in the

58:58

form of simple credit. And that's it. The

59:00

customer support will fulfill the orders and everything. So

59:02

we launched with this and then, uh, we

59:04

kept on building, but yeah, I learned a

59:07

lot from the product side to the design side to

59:09

the like customer experience side and everything, because again, like

59:11

I was one of the early employees. We did not

59:13

repeat the same mistakes, but we did some different mistakes.

59:15

Yeah. And I learned from these mistakes. So

59:19

I kept working with them. Uh, so after C four

59:21

months, when we got more funding, we started hiring more

59:23

people, we got, uh, like really strong

59:25

people. Like we got the VP of product who was

59:27

working at the Lando. The Lando is like super big

59:29

company in Germany. Uh, they have

59:32

like 3000 developers, 3000 developers in total. They

59:34

are like five, 6,000 or maybe more than

59:37

that, like number of people. They're super big,

59:39

uh, e-commerce platform. They got her from there.

59:41

They got some key people from Amazon, from

59:43

Alibaba and so on. So I was

59:45

working with this and I was there since early days. I had

59:47

made my name that come on is really fast. He can deliver

59:49

this and he can develop this. So on whatever is there.

59:52

Just give it to him. So you have to

59:54

give me certain for getting things done. Yeah.

59:57

So I was running also

59:59

at that time. Then I got some team members.

1:00:01

I got 13 people in my team because I

1:00:03

was there early I'm still young like

1:00:05

20 we're talking about like 24 25 not maybe more than that 25

1:00:07

or 6 I

1:00:09

got 13 people that I'm managing at that time. I got more and more

1:00:11

people over time I got to work with all these people and so on

1:00:13

so I was working with them, but then I

1:00:17

Was fine. I was learning a lot no issues,

1:00:19

but then I thought that Dubai in

1:00:22

the end. I mean in The

1:00:24

long run there's no benefit like if I stay

1:00:26

here for 20 years in the

1:00:28

end I need to go back because they there's no way

1:00:30

to be permanent there. There's no path citizenship or anything like

1:00:32

that No, there's nothing there, so

1:00:35

I already had spent like eight nine years, so I started thinking

1:00:37

about I should go to Germany So

1:00:39

I decided to go to Germany Germany as a lando There's big

1:00:42

company that I told you about I applied then I got the

1:00:44

job there I joined this company called

1:00:46

they had a product called the lawn so they had

1:00:48

this customer could

1:00:50

talk to customer experience and Stylist and they could

1:00:52

decide like what could be the fashion that they

1:00:55

might throw to you they used to send their

1:00:57

picture And then they would tell them like put

1:00:59

this shirt on put this put this pants on

1:01:01

and so on So it's not like telemedicine for

1:01:03

fashion Kind

1:01:06

of yeah, so they

1:01:08

were trying to decommission this project and build

1:01:10

us into the rando And

1:01:13

this was like even though this company was super

1:01:15

big She thought the developers on I had the

1:01:17

chance to work on this rebuilding of this platform.

1:01:19

I was I was Like

1:01:23

it was individual contributor, but I was at the

1:01:25

same level as the engineering manager So

1:01:27

there was a lot a lot of things to

1:01:30

be done here I had to do the Architectural

1:01:32

thinking architectural design get the buy-in from the different

1:01:34

teams talk to principal engineers talk to party customer

1:01:36

support and so on So

1:01:38

even though I thought that I would not learn

1:01:40

much, but I'm not looking at learning now I'm

1:01:42

looking at the future like naturalization or becoming permanent

1:01:45

there. Yeah, so I decided to stay there At

1:01:48

that time now roadmap was built at my previous company

1:01:50

in the devil the one that I told you about

1:01:53

Because I was doing a lot of side projects and so on so

1:01:55

I built this roadmap at that time Appel

1:01:57

developer roadmap with two roadmaps

1:01:59

front and back into visual paths that users

1:02:01

could use to get the idea about different

1:02:04

landscapes. Now I

1:02:06

was working on this on the side. I was spending like one

1:02:08

or two hours per week on this and it was organically growing

1:02:11

on the side. It grew

1:02:13

from like when I launched it in a week it launched

1:02:15

it went to almost like 10,000 stars and

1:02:17

it kept on growing organically. I was not working too much

1:02:19

two hours per week. It grew to almost like 150,000 stars

1:02:22

in Germany when I was there in Germany. Inside

1:02:25

Partners, the company they reached out to me at that

1:02:28

time and they said that what

1:02:30

are your plans for this? Would you be willing to, are

1:02:34

you looking to acquire like for

1:02:36

us to acquire this? Are you looking to sell this?

1:02:39

Initially I said no but then we had long discussion for

1:02:41

six, seven months and then we decided to end up with

1:02:43

the agreement and then I moved to

1:02:45

the way back and I said that I'd join them full time

1:02:47

because this is too big of an opportunity. Roadmap is something that

1:02:49

I love. I can get to work on this full time. I

1:02:52

can do a lot from the product side, from the community

1:02:54

side and so on. I decided to join them and go

1:02:56

back to the big and then kept on

1:02:58

working and from 22 till now I'm working on this

1:03:00

full time. Okay so 2022, so

1:03:02

we're 2024. For the past two years

1:03:05

you've been working on roadmap.sh full time.

1:03:07

Full time, yeah. And you moved back

1:03:09

to Dubai. Did you abandon like your

1:03:12

goal of getting like EU citizenship? Well

1:03:15

I guess is that still

1:03:17

something you'd like to do? We'll definitely talk

1:03:19

about those are the things I'm just curious

1:03:21

though because that was why you moved

1:03:23

to Germany right? Yeah so Germany I was there.

1:03:25

I thought that I mean this is this. I mean

1:03:28

you know that the grass is greener on the other side.

1:03:30

So I was there in Germany. Germany used to look super

1:03:32

interesting from the outside and that

1:03:35

there's like all this tech going on. All the cars

1:03:37

that you see there from Germany. All the

1:03:39

like all the things that you purchase if it is for

1:03:41

German. It's like a stamp of quality like it's the best

1:03:43

thing and so on. But when I was there

1:03:45

like a German language was super

1:03:48

difficult. I spent the six

1:03:50

seven months. I didn't see that I will learn

1:03:52

German at all. The only thing that I learned

1:03:54

in six months was Ishpen Kamran. MKamran. So

1:03:58

Guten Morgan, Guten Nax, so all these three. for

1:04:00

words and depth that I don't know any German

1:04:02

at all. One of the challenges is Germans speak

1:04:04

such excellent English just like people from Pakistan and

1:04:06

India and a lot of other places. But

1:04:09

Germany, they're actually like, they

1:04:11

have one of the best English education systems

1:04:13

in the world. Like most English

1:04:15

teachers will, if you want to teach English

1:04:17

as a second language, the German system has

1:04:19

usually held up that. Maybe like, you know,

1:04:21

Sweden also has a really good one. But

1:04:24

because of that, I imagine pretty much everything you

1:04:26

did was in English, right? Like were there ever

1:04:28

meetings that you went to where everybody was speaking

1:04:31

German and you just had to sit there and

1:04:33

try to understand or did they just use English

1:04:35

as the business language? That's the

1:04:37

reason why I didn't learn German at all. So they

1:04:39

were, everything was in English. I was in Berlin. So

1:04:41

Berlin was like a capital of Germany. So everything is

1:04:43

there in English. You don't have to even think about

1:04:46

learning German at all. And on the

1:04:48

side, I had a lot of different things. So I could

1:04:50

not spend time on learning German. And so

1:04:52

I thought if I continue with the same path, I don't think I'll

1:04:54

be learning German and you need to spend eight years here. So

1:04:57

you have to spend eight years to become a German

1:04:59

citizen. Yeah, you get the PRC. So

1:05:02

you spend three years, you get the permanent residence. If you

1:05:04

know German A1 or A2, which is super easy, you can

1:05:06

do A1, A2, A2, A3. But

1:05:08

to get to

1:05:10

A2, after A2, you can get the passport, but you need

1:05:13

to be C2. OK,

1:05:15

so basically C2, just to give

1:05:18

context, I assume the German language,

1:05:20

I know nothing about learning German. I would

1:05:22

never learn German just because every German I

1:05:24

speak to speaks excellent English. Not

1:05:26

the case with the languages that I have been

1:05:29

studying, like Japanese, Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese and stuff

1:05:31

like that. But

1:05:33

if it follows

1:05:36

the CEFR, the

1:05:38

Common European Something Framework,

1:05:41

if it follows that, then C2 is

1:05:44

basically like full professional fluency. That's not

1:05:46

easy to achieve. That

1:05:48

takes people with English. That might take people three

1:05:51

or four years of intensive study to get their English

1:05:53

up to level C2. So you

1:05:55

were very far from being able to

1:05:58

get the full citizenship. I mean, it would have been. probably

1:06:00

thousands of hours of

1:06:03

study to be able to do that. So,

1:06:05

is that the main reason? What about, are

1:06:08

there any countries in the EU that you

1:06:10

could have potentially immigrated

1:06:12

to where English didn't have

1:06:14

these language requirements, for example?

1:06:17

Sweden doesn't need Sweden. You can get the passport after

1:06:19

five years. You don't

1:06:21

need to learn German. I mean, Swedish. So

1:06:23

Sweden was the only option, I think. I don't

1:06:25

know anything else. But at that time, I knew about

1:06:27

Sweden, but I found out about Sweden later

1:06:29

when I moved here. But it was super

1:06:32

late at that time. So I thought that, I

1:06:34

mean, is this extra, the extra time

1:06:36

that I get in the day, should I be

1:06:38

spending this on learning German and becoming German, or

1:06:40

should I spend this time on learning myself and

1:06:42

like getting better at things? So

1:06:45

getting better or improving myself seemed like a

1:06:47

better option than learning German. So I thought,

1:06:49

I'll go back. And I thought that, I mean, if

1:06:51

you're good at what you do, you

1:06:53

can be anywhere in the world. It doesn't matter if

1:06:55

you're in Germany or Pakistan or India or wherever you are.

1:06:59

So that was the thing that I had. I thought that I'll go back to

1:07:01

the way and I'll stay there. I'll work from there. So

1:07:04

I moved there. We've, acquisition

1:07:06

happened. It was a long discussion. We kept

1:07:08

on discussing for almost six, seven months. I

1:07:10

had the acquisition offers before for roadmap as

1:07:12

well. Like there were three or four big

1:07:15

names. If you're a

1:07:17

developer, you probably already know about them. There

1:07:19

were big names reached out to me for the acquisition.

1:07:21

I didn't do it because of multiple reasons. The

1:07:24

first thing was like, either they were a course

1:07:26

platform that they wanted to integrate roadmap with their

1:07:28

platform. Audience was mostly beginners and they

1:07:30

were coming to it because it was a free platform. And

1:07:32

I didn't want the product to see

1:07:34

as a paywall and then no one can access

1:07:37

it because it's now a paid

1:07:39

product. This was one thing.

1:07:41

The other reason was they either wanted to shut

1:07:43

down and they wanted the traffic from it just

1:07:45

to get a proper, because roadmap has a good

1:07:47

SEO profile. So they wanted the backlink and stuff.

1:07:50

They wanted to build a redirect into their platform. This was the

1:07:52

other reason. The third thing was, I

1:07:55

mean, I was getting a lot of positive messages almost

1:07:57

every day. I get a message

1:07:59

from someone. Thank you. me like thank you for building roadmap just

1:08:01

last week i got a message from someone he

1:08:03

said that i graduated in 21. roadmap

1:08:06

is the only resource that i followed and

1:08:08

it completely changed my trajectory for the

1:08:11

career and finance so now i

1:08:13

have a full-time job and i'm able to support

1:08:15

my family and myself because of roadmap so thank

1:08:17

you for making this so this is just one

1:08:19

example from last week imagine

1:08:21

if you're getting this kind of messages like every week or

1:08:23

so so i was thinking about this

1:08:25

like i'm destroying this project just for some money and

1:08:27

i'm already making like good money i don't need any

1:08:30

money right so why would i sell it so i

1:08:32

decided to just say uh no to them before but

1:08:34

this time inside part of this was a bit

1:08:36

different so they're super big they have

1:08:39

like 92 billion dollar of assets in their control

1:08:41

they're super big private equity firm in us uh

1:08:44

so initially i said no but in the discussions

1:08:46

i asked them like what what their plans are

1:08:48

what my plans are we had a long discussions

1:08:50

i told them like if i was working

1:08:52

on this full time i would do this as this what

1:08:55

are your plans for this they said that we want you to

1:08:57

come on board and work on this full time and do whatever

1:08:59

you want so they promised me this

1:09:01

autonomy and not interfering at all with what i'm

1:09:03

going to do so this

1:09:06

seemed really good because at my uh

1:09:08

current job i was also kind of

1:09:10

bored because it was corporate-ish even though

1:09:12

it was a big company uh and

1:09:15

roadmap was something that i was passionate about i mean sometime

1:09:17

i was set and started working on this i could spend

1:09:19

like full day working on working on this and i would

1:09:21

not feel bored so there's something i

1:09:23

was not bored doing at all so that's why i

1:09:25

thought that this is like a dream come true so

1:09:27

i said yes to them and i joined full time

1:09:30

roadmap yeah

1:09:33

so this ended up i

1:09:35

think one of the best decisions in the past

1:09:37

two and a half years that i've been full

1:09:39

time on roadmap it has

1:09:42

gone super well uh when the acquisition happened

1:09:44

the number of users at that time used

1:09:46

to be 150 at that time per month

1:09:48

hundred fifty thousand we did not

1:09:50

have any registration we did not have any features for

1:09:52

learning and so on there used to be

1:09:54

four roadmaps at that time front and back and devops at

1:09:56

qa and that's it and if

1:09:58

i look back now so today we are last month we

1:10:00

had almost like 1.25 million

1:10:02

users per month. We have more than 1

1:10:05

million user registered users, more

1:10:07

than 10,000 teams. We have

1:10:09

this super complicated roadmap editor

1:10:11

for making custom roadmaps. We

1:10:14

have this robust infrastructure and

1:10:16

yeah, 35,000 I think roadmaps at

1:10:20

the moment. So it has grown massively. So it was

1:10:22

I think the best decision because the

1:10:24

product also kept its image of being free and

1:10:26

so on. They did not destroy it. They don't

1:10:28

interfere at all. So I tell them like what

1:10:31

I'm going to work on. They never tell me

1:10:33

like this, you should do this next or whatever

1:10:35

it is. So yeah, so the rest is history.

1:10:38

That's awesome. That sounds like a really successful

1:10:40

acquisition so far. One of

1:10:42

the few positive case studies of a private equity

1:10:44

firm, you know,

1:10:46

acquiring a company and the company proceeding to actually

1:10:48

get better and do even more stuff. But I

1:10:51

think a lot of that is probably because now

1:10:53

you have the flexibility to focus full time on

1:10:55

it, right? That's been a big part of the

1:10:57

past two years is you've

1:10:59

got this open source superstar,

1:11:02

Cameron Ahmed, just dedicating

1:11:04

like a whole lot more time and energy

1:11:06

because he doesn't have a day job that

1:11:08

he has to also juggle, right? So just

1:11:10

being a full-time dev and maybe you can

1:11:13

talk like, I guess what I want

1:11:15

to learn more about is you're a

1:11:17

full-time open source maintainer now, essentially.

1:11:20

Yeah. I mean, and you're a

1:11:22

GitHub star, which is a big deal. It's

1:11:25

an honor that not very many people, maybe a few

1:11:27

hundred people have that distinction. We've

1:11:29

had a few of them on the podcast

1:11:31

here, but I'm adding you to

1:11:33

my collection of GitHub stars we've

1:11:35

had on. And you're also a

1:11:38

Google developer expert. Maybe you can talk about

1:11:41

like what day-to-day life is like as

1:11:43

an open source maintainer living

1:11:46

in Dubai.

1:11:48

I'm not sure exactly how you pronounce it. I

1:11:50

want to try to pronounce it like, you

1:11:52

know, it's natively pronounced. Yeah.

1:11:56

Which city are you? So you're

1:11:58

in Dubai, but we'll... Which

1:12:01

part of town are you in?

1:12:03

Because it's like a giant megalopolis,

1:12:05

basically. Yeah. So I wasn't,

1:12:08

I said Dubai also, I think you said Dubai.

1:12:10

Dubai, I'll just say Dubai. I don't know what I'm

1:12:12

trying to do. I'm not a native Arabic speaker or

1:12:15

anything like that. And I'm just gonna butcher it. So,

1:12:17

yeah. Yeah,

1:12:21

I went to Dubai. I was there for almost a year

1:12:23

and a half. And last year, a year and a half

1:12:25

ago, I moved to UK. So right now I'm based in

1:12:27

UK. Okay, you're in the UK now. Yeah,

1:12:29

so in the back of my mind, I still have

1:12:31

that. I mean, even though I have this mindset that

1:12:33

you can be good and you can be anywhere in

1:12:35

the world and you can stay there, but I knew

1:12:38

that you can't be permanently here. You need to, at

1:12:40

some point, go out of here, whether it is

1:12:42

going to be like somewhere else or

1:12:44

back to Pakistan. So I

1:12:47

came across, I differentiate with me the global tenant

1:12:49

visa. So UK has a global tenant visa. Global

1:12:51

talent visa. Okay. So

1:12:53

if you have a good open source profile, if you're doing

1:12:56

a lot of community work, if you have worked with

1:12:58

products before, like product based companies and you're

1:13:00

good in the IT, then you can apply and

1:13:02

then they can endorse you and then you can come

1:13:04

here. So there's a

1:13:06

visa, like the O1 visa, I think in US. So you

1:13:08

have the O1 visa, I think. So it's

1:13:10

similar to that. But it's like, you

1:13:13

know, genius visa or something. I don't know what they call

1:13:15

it, but yeah. So it's similar

1:13:17

to that, but for UK. I had

1:13:19

experience with the startups. I had experience with

1:13:21

the community work. I had this case study

1:13:23

of roadmap that I was doing it on

1:13:25

the side without not expecting anything in return.

1:13:28

And I was making this much from it and

1:13:30

all this like all this money that I was

1:13:32

making on the side and from roadmap and so

1:13:34

on. So I gave this, I prepared

1:13:37

this profile and I applied for a performance visa and I got

1:13:39

this visa. Because UK was

1:13:41

English country, no language barrier. So I decided to

1:13:43

just say yes. And then I came here. So

1:13:45

now I'm based in UK in Leeds at the

1:13:48

moment. Yeah. Just

1:13:51

totally unrelated since I didn't even realize you were

1:13:53

in the UK because you travel so much. Obviously

1:13:56

Pakistan like the US is kind

1:13:58

of a former. you

1:20:00

become a builder or

1:20:02

you start contributing. Personally I

1:20:04

like to build own things better than

1:20:06

contributing because contributing I mean

1:20:09

you learn but you don't learn as much as

1:20:11

you could learn from some famous open-source project that

1:20:13

you are able to build to develop but initially

1:20:15

you're not going to build something super famous from

1:20:17

the get-go so I'd normally recommend that when you're

1:20:19

starting with your career if you have never done

1:20:21

any get a project before go on

1:20:23

get up find the projects that you can contribute to projects

1:20:26

that are active so when you see like there

1:20:28

are 50 open pull requests or 100 open pull

1:20:30

requests no one is looking at them the last

1:20:32

activity was four or five months ago and no

1:20:34

one is not doing anything don't look at the

1:20:36

such products the price that are active for them

1:20:38

for free code camp or roadmap product go

1:20:40

and look at the contribution docs look at the

1:20:42

open issues and then see what you can

1:20:44

solve and go and while sticking to

1:20:47

the guidelines open a pull request they

1:20:49

will tell you about like how you can improve look

1:20:51

at like how they are merging pull requests how are

1:20:53

they responding to the issues and so on like look

1:20:55

at everything how they are mending this open-source project and

1:20:57

gain some experience from sample request let's

1:20:59

say 10-15 pull requests you've

1:21:01

done them now like start thinking about like

1:21:03

what you should develop initially

1:21:06

in my in my career I may have done like

1:21:08

four or five projects like four or five contribution

1:21:10

pull requests and then I just started on doing my

1:21:12

own projects because

1:21:15

I thought that I could learn more from building my own

1:21:17

things so yeah that would be

1:21:19

way like find the product that are active submit some pull

1:21:21

requests get some experience see how they're

1:21:23

mending issues discussion pull requests look at the read me

1:21:25

how the read me looks like and so on and

1:21:27

think about the idea that you can develop and think

1:21:29

and start building those things now the next thing is

1:21:31

how to come up with the ideas so

1:21:34

I'll tell you like how I came up up with my

1:21:36

own idea for my products so initially

1:21:38

I was a PHP developer right early in my career

1:21:41

so I was always thinking what should I build

1:21:43

this I'm not sure like what should

1:21:45

I build right so I used to look at

1:21:48

Ruby or Python and different languages I would look

1:21:50

at what are the famous libraries there or what

1:21:53

are the famous classes that are there

1:21:55

in PHP or Python Python or Ruby

1:21:57

or different languages and I

1:21:59

would see like if there is some in PHP,

1:22:01

if there is nothing there, or if there

1:22:03

is some abandoned project, I would

1:22:05

take the inspiration from that project in Ruby or Python, and

1:22:07

I would build the same thing in the PHP. So

1:22:10

this is how I came up with the

1:22:12

initial projects, like build my own projects in

1:22:14

this manner. Interesting, okay, so essentially porting projects

1:22:17

to a different ecosystem. So

1:22:19

that way you already know that there's a demand

1:22:21

in this ecosystem, like in the PHP ecosystem, people

1:22:23

are using a library for this, Node.js

1:22:26

doesn't have a good enough library for this yet, let's see

1:22:28

if we can just port it. Yeah.

1:22:32

So this is one thing, the second thing is, the

1:22:36

other way is to look at your own problems.

1:22:38

Like in the work at work, for example, what

1:22:41

are you trying to do? I'll

1:22:43

tell you, like I have a library called Maundex,

1:22:46

it's used to apply

1:22:48

indexes to MongoDB, so normally how

1:22:50

you create indexes is in the Node.js, either you

1:22:52

do it in the Mongoose or whatever ORM you're

1:22:54

using, you specify the indexes there, which

1:22:57

becomes difficult to maintain, let's say that you have back

1:22:59

office, you have this service and you have this service,

1:23:01

you have let's say 50 services, now

1:23:03

you have to add the indexes, so you have to do in

1:23:05

all these projects one by one. So instead

1:23:07

if you have one place where you could like write

1:23:09

all these indexes you need, and then you run one

1:23:12

command, it would apply all these indexes. So look at

1:23:14

your own problems, so this was a problem that I

1:23:16

had, and I came up with this

1:23:18

Maundex, so write a JSON file, put all the

1:23:20

indexes in there, and then run

1:23:22

command Maundex apply, and then it would apply the

1:23:24

indexes on the database, because this database is connected

1:23:26

in the back office, in this service and this

1:23:28

service. Or for example, let's say

1:23:31

that you have this, another open

1:23:33

source project that I had, I removed it, I archived

1:23:35

it before, was let's say that

1:23:37

in my first company we're using Garvel, Garvel

1:23:40

was not built for building API, it had

1:23:42

tweak at that time, it was mainly used for

1:23:45

building like templating engine and proper

1:23:47

frameworks. For APIs you need

1:23:49

more than just the templating engine, for

1:23:51

example there's API specification for HTTP error,

1:23:54

so if there is error happening in the API,

1:23:57

how should it be responded with? It should be state and

1:23:59

start. It

1:32:00

just worked out that way and it was probably

1:32:02

as much luck as anything with

1:32:04

the timing. But learning

1:32:06

in public, putting together this resource, putting

1:32:08

it out there, that often

1:32:11

will be reciprocated and rewarded

1:32:13

by developers out there who

1:32:15

see value in things. And these

1:32:17

websites like Hacker News, which is

1:32:19

news.whitecombinator.com, whitecombinator of course being this

1:32:21

famous accelerator that a lot of

1:32:23

the people that I've had on

1:32:25

this podcast have gone through for

1:32:27

example. Like

1:32:31

Free Code Camp. I've been in a similar situation where I

1:32:33

was talking to somebody and they're like, oh, what's Free Code

1:32:35

Camp? Is this project going to

1:32:37

take off? And I could be like, yeah, look, we're on

1:32:39

the front page of Hacker News right now with this article

1:32:41

that I wrote or something like that. And

1:32:44

it's always a really cool feeling having something

1:32:46

on the front of Hacker News or having

1:32:48

something on the front of our program, one

1:32:50

of the bigger programming subreddits. So

1:32:54

that's really cool that you put it out there. And

1:32:56

so yeah. Oh, yeah. So

1:32:59

it was all like, I mean, I was not aiming that it

1:33:01

would go. I built it. I thought whenever I was building it.

1:33:03

So one thing you should also do is when you build something,

1:33:05

don't just leave it. You should tell people

1:33:07

that post it on Reddit, post it on Hacker News.

1:33:09

The non-new people don't post it either because they think

1:33:11

it's, I mean, you would look stupid because the code

1:33:14

base is so bad or you don't do it because

1:33:16

people think that I would look like I'm bragging. So

1:33:18

I don't post it for example. At least I would

1:33:20

use to think that either my code

1:33:22

is bad. It would look like I'm bragging, for example,

1:33:25

or just because I didn't want to reply

1:33:27

to people or just put myself out there. So

1:33:29

this is one of the mistakes that many people

1:33:31

do. You should not do that. I mean, when

1:33:34

you build something, just tell people, put it on

1:33:36

Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, everywhere. Absolutely.

1:33:38

I'll just say like from my own experience,

1:33:41

the universe is indifferent. Most

1:33:44

people do not care that if they don't know,

1:33:46

if you're not like right in front of their

1:33:48

eyes that with them like seeing something in a

1:33:50

recommendation algorithm feed or something like that, they are

1:33:52

never going to stumble upon this project

1:33:54

that you put a lot of time into. If

1:33:56

you don't go out and publicize it, don't

1:33:58

wait around for somebody's. They

1:48:01

love customizing their education like they

1:48:03

would love retrofitting their car with

1:48:05

like non-manufactured,

1:48:07

non-OEM parts, non-stock

1:48:11

parts, right? Custom

1:48:13

parts. I'm sorry, I'm struggling. I don't know anything about

1:48:15

car modifications. I'm just trying to come up with an

1:48:17

example. But people approach their education the

1:48:19

same way. They're like, yeah, everybody's reading John Duckett's

1:48:21

HTML book, but I'm going to read O'Reilly

1:48:24

Headfirst into HTML. All

1:48:27

ways that they can express themselves through customization, things

1:48:29

like that. I love that you

1:48:31

have kind of like the recommended, but here also

1:48:33

if you want to be a little bit

1:48:36

more rogue in your

1:48:38

approach to developing, yeah, and you want

1:48:40

to brew your own education. That's

1:48:43

cool. All right. Well, come

1:48:45

on. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you

1:48:47

for nearly two hours and learning from you. Before

1:48:50

this, you and I hadn't talked synchronously. We

1:48:52

just corresponded a lot through Twitter messages and

1:48:54

stuff. It sounds like I've

1:48:57

been a long-time admirer of yours, so I've been admiring

1:48:59

you from afar, but it's cool to be able to

1:49:01

admire you in real time and also to thank you

1:49:04

for your big open source contributions.

1:49:08

For everything you've done that you've put out there

1:49:11

to make the world a better,

1:49:13

more open, freer place in the sense

1:49:16

that free access to information, one of

1:49:18

the core beliefs of mine

1:49:20

is that information wants to be free,

1:49:22

education wants to be free, and there

1:49:24

are people that talk about that, and then there are

1:49:26

the people out there that are walking

1:49:28

it, that are living it, putting these

1:49:31

projects up. Yeah,

1:49:33

but I mean, I've been the huge admirer of

1:49:35

free code camp as well. Whenever someone mentions roadmap,

1:49:37

normally like I see because I have alerts

1:49:41

for roadmap or what I said, I keep an eye on

1:49:43

the feedback and so on. Free code camp is always there.

1:49:45

Like roadmap and free code camp, they're always there together. So

1:49:48

I mean, yeah, you're also putting a lot of free content

1:49:50

in there. I mean, we are giving the path, but you

1:49:52

have the actual content in there. And

1:49:54

having it there for free and a lot of quality

1:49:56

that your YouTube channel, for example, you have this like

1:49:59

10 hours of free courses on. AWS, like

1:50:01

all the free going that you're putting, I mean, yeah,

1:50:03

it's been massive. Like I keep myself, I see myself

1:50:05

recommending it all the time, so yeah. Awesome,

1:50:08

man. Well, it's been such a pleasure to talk

1:50:10

to you. Everyone listening,

1:50:13

be sure to check the show notes for lots more resources,

1:50:15

including a link to Roadmap. As soon as you can see

1:50:17

some of these diagrams yourself, some

1:50:19

of these roadmaps, and to

1:50:22

some of the other projects we've talked about,

1:50:24

including Free Code Camps, how to contribute

1:50:26

to open source project, which we're very proud of, which

1:50:28

will kind of give you a

1:50:30

ground ramp if you want to get involved in contributing to Roadmap or

1:50:33

to Free Code Camp. Both projects have

1:50:35

extensive contributor documentation that you can

1:50:37

use. Man, it's just

1:50:39

such a pleasure, such an honor to talk to you. That

1:50:42

quest. Yeah, well, until

1:50:45

next week everybody, happy coding.