An unlikely background for an engineer.

An unlikely background for an engineer.

I come from a well-off family & I used to be an amateur boxer. My parents groomed me to inherit the family businesses & I had little care for anything.

Over the years, my father went to prison, my family lost a big chunk of its wealth, and I found myself in my early twenties, not knowing what to do next. I was ‘groomed’ to inherit the family businesses, but these businesses did not exist anymore.

So, I had to set out & blaze my path. Unfortunately, I’ve wandered a bit & made some mistakes that I won’t tackle in this post.

But in October 2019, I happened upon my now-good friend Abuamerican. Although we were strangers, he mentioned on Twitter that he needed a website & I cold emailed him saying I could do it for him.

I only knew a little besides being able to set up WordPress. But that was still better than the broken Wix website he used to have at the time. And that’s how I got into web development.

Once I noticed that I could earn money making WP sites, I realized it was a matter of improving my skills and finding more customers. In my first 12 months, I made about $2-3k. Which is quite shit, but I saw progress, so I stuck with it.

In my second year, I made around $20k and learned a ton from a technical aspect. Whereas at the beginning of my career, I was a WP ‘developer,’ now I was building custom web apps with PHP & Next.js.

I still chose to quit freelancing, though, because it sucks.