Welcome to aalam.in

Hi 👋 . My name's Aftab Alam, and as of writing this, I'm a Javascript Full-stack Architect at Publicis Sapient leading the migration of a large enterprise e-commerce application for a multinational telecommunications conglomerate.

The site you're on is a long-delayed and deferred culmination of my wish to share what I learn. It's my slice of the internet, which I intend to use for sharing my thoughts, explorations, and experiences I've gained and consistently augmenting building large-scale solutions and perfecting my craftsmanship. I ❤️️ this never-ceasing-to-impress field of web development, and I've got a penchant for experimenting with tools & techniques, that can transform workflows, induce efficiency, and make you more informed and efficient so that you could be a better problem-solver.

Few folks call it 'Shiny Object' Syndrome too, but I guess that's how you grow and evolve and it's just curiosity at the end of the day!

Okay… why does this matter?

I think I've remained in the boat of will-blog-sometime-soon for just too long. Too long to see hosted/managed medium jobs outsourced to simple, magically efficient, and super-capable build-oriented tools. It almost feels like the nature of content-authoring tech tried and rooted for JAMStack to happen so that I can start writing 😉 (what a silly excuse). Still, However, it works, and whatever the excuse may be, It has no bearing on the outcome, which is

delay -> accumulation -> concentrated knowledge(your own realm)

Ideas/thoughts sitting in your head are like books sitting on a shelf. It's also like growing a tree in a very closed and controlled environment or nurturing fishes in an aquarium. As an outcome of holding on to something for that long, you create your realm. A place, where all the roads just come in, and inner things very seldom go out, to chart their journey, test their worth, and be perfected in the process.

Technology is a continuously evolving landscape, and not sharing could be akin to not facilitating the evolution that's rooted so much in your knowledge. It's the intersection and collision of how you view things and how something is known/viewed by folks more knowledgeable than you that leads to greater learnings and understanding.

There's a difference between making things work and knowing things well.

Also, in a world, that could be seen at times sandwiched between a busy bandwagon and infinite loop(busy and distracted), the little charmers and wins we have in our daily jobs could easily miss it to contribute valuably if we don't make it important to build upon what we know by sharing and collaboration.

It's becoming increasingly essential to have habits and avenues capable of bringing value to our thinking, practices, life, and work.

So, a blog?

Yep, a blog. A blank slate that inspires you to take a pause, and be thoughtful while putting your thoughts out. An excellent medium

to make your learnings/experiences more useful, to you and in turn to the community
to provide opportunities to explain/reason about things well
to improve technical writing skills
to facilitate enriching and enlightening discourses

A blog just ticks off so many things on your must-do checklists as a Technologist.

Yeah, stuff could be tweeted, and the un-necessary fillers could be avoided. I also share my thoughts, ideas, and useful resources on Twitter, but few topics I believe deserve more character arc, stage, personality, and prominence to be of use, than what could be captured in those thought-and-time capsules 😊

What to expect?

Over the last 10+ years, I've dabbled in, tried, mastered, and employed many things ranging from back-end Frameworks to Hybrid Mobile Apps, from APIs to SPAs to solve real-world problems. I've found myself lucky enough to tap into modern and cutting-edge technologies, right at the moment they were a thing and I don't see myself settling and stopping anytime soon.

With the initial few blogs I'll try to start with things that are more close to my developer heart or the things I'm doing a lot professionally. I'm currently working on several blog/series titles covering various technologies in the Angular and React ecosystem, Next.js, Typescript, GraphQL, and some broader topics like modern tooling, micro-frontends, etc.

I also wanna approach this year's learning goals through a more organized and accountable #LearnInPublic system and working hard to publish few living docs that will track and get constantly updated with my weekly/monthly achievements.

Closing Thoughts

With all that said, I hope you're all ready to embark on this new journey with me. I am very excited to see what y'all get from and think about the future posts and I hope this blog can give you the right dose of developer content-ainment this year, and in years to come.

See y'all in the next post.

— Aftab Alam