How a side project turned into an open source full time job

Intro

While I wrote a reflection about my 4 year mark at ahrefs, I often got asked: how did you got the job there?

This blog post is a personal story of how I joined ahrefs by keep betting on learning, by sharing my work online and how did I reach one of my dreams.

Because it was one of my dreams. Looking back 6 o 7 years ago, the dream was to work on open source projects, improve and maintain the tooling I created, help teams ship better/faster/safer code while sharing it in the community.

I mean, one of my work dreams. The real dream is to create a nice family win and win an Ironman.

I’m sharing this as encouragement for others that might be on the same situation and to flex how beneficial might be to follow your curiosity and don’t stop learning… rather than following what everybody is doing or any other silly race.

How did I create styled-ppx

At Spain, during COVID restrictions there were almost 60 days of lockdown, which made a perfect opportunity to spend more time on some random open source work.

I was working at draftbit [www.draftbit.com] and felt the pain of manually writing styles with bs-css and also the pain of tailwind (link to tailwind).

I missed my previous hability to write CSS co-located with your React code by

Everything is a compiler?

subtitle: What did I learned?

subtitle: What did I need to learn?

• Needed a CSS parser
• Need to understand how to write a ppx
• How you write a project with Reason native?

First contribution to the reason community

• Great success, share twitter thread
• Share comments about it

First users

• xx
• xx

Ahrefs contacted me

• Start asking for small features, which were easy and nice
• until they asked for a much bigger piece
• I said, “sure, will do it during this year, after summer I have a few weekends free”
• and they replied, what about you do it in 1 week?

Hired to work on styled-ppx initially

Migrated the entire codebase to styled-ppx

• Share numbers
• Link to 3 years at ahrefs

Todos

1. Pick a topic
   • What should I write about?
   • Use your experiences with the chosen topic
2. Plan the the main points
   • Write out the main headings
   • Show the reader a preview of the main topics
3. Write the introduction
   • Start with what you want the article to achieve
4. Start writing
   • Get a recording of a conversation to the person who you try to explain the article
   • Transcribe your words
   • Write/read/check and repeat
5. Proof read your work
   • From the heading to the last character
6. Share it with some related persons
7. Publish it
   • Choose where to share the post: Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter, some community?

Thanks for reaching the end. Let me know if you have any feedback, corrections or questions. Always happy to chat about any topic mentioned in this post, feel free to reach out.