How i went from a highschool student to an entrepreneur to taking care of one government website development📈

So first of all you might be asking your self, who the heck is he?

Well that understandable after all this is my first blog post. So my name is Abdulrahman Sakah (or "abdul" "abbe", "abod" for short) and i am software engineeringering student in sweden.

My start 🏁

So i got my intresset in programming when i was around 10 where i was working with moding Minecraft and then i was really interested on how things work under the hood, so i started looking on Youtube how Minecraft is made and i found a video of an interview with Notch. The way he just changed stuff in the game with code and created something from nothing impressed me. Since then i knew what i want to do with my life.

I started to learn about programming and o found Unity 3D engine so i taghut my self C# to be able to program my own game and i made alot of games that only i got to play until i made my own game that i really liked it was called blow it up and it was for a gamejam. I wanted to advertise the game and i knew that if someone is going to look they want to see a website so i started working with html and css and i loved it.

My begning into real programming 🛫

After learning html and css a couple of years went by without working with them and i put all my focus on a game i was working on called way of war (wich i lost in the end due to file corruption) but anyways while i am in highschool i choose to study programming and we had C# as our language.

Since the first lesson when i looked into the book i went to the teacher and was like "this book is nothing for me, dont you have anything harder?" And her replied by giving me a test to see my skills from the first lesson.
When i was done with the test and he looked at it he told me that this course is not for me and my programming skills are much higher then this course and i have a A in the course. But they needed a book handleing system for the school so he gave me the task to make a book handeling system so the teacher knows what student has what book and so i created bookly in java.

That was when i was introduced to SQLite and backend development and i loved it.

So o decided to work more with backend and fronend development so i choose to learn JavaScript so i can work with that.

The first job 🖥️

After a year of learning js and mysql a friend of my wanted to open his own barbershop and he was telling me how he wanted a website so i offered him to make him the website for free and he just has to pay for the domain and hosting.

After me creating the website alot of customers loved it and loved how people can directly book appointments on the website so in the summer of 2019 i started receiving alot of calls of people wanting thier own websites and as i newbie in the market i knew 2 things. First i cant ask for high prices from begning and secound how to build a name. And that is thanks to my dad who owned his own company in Kuwait and built it from the ground up to be the one of the bigest design and signs company in Kuwait.

The first website i got to build in exchange for money i made it for 500 sek or 50 usd and that is nothing and it was a big project where i had to make a e-commerce website with online payment and all.

After working with multiple customers on low prices and decided to up my prices so i started charging a couple of hunder dollars for a website depending on the complexity.

In the end when it came to choosing my University profession i knew i wantee to continue with this so i chose software engineering because it is not only web development but alot more and it had a broder aspect to study.

Starting uni 📚

Now i am in my secound year but studying in uni taught me alot of stuff like complex database development, UML planing, unit testing and more and these are stuff that i going to use in my next chapter.

But one thing that i am sad about is not being able to continue my bussnies because running a business is not easy and it takes alot of your time from meeting with customers to working to calculating taxes, so was not balance between studying and running my own bussnies.

Working with the government 🛃

During this summer, the summer of 2021 a municipality in sweden hit me up about needing someone to care of thier website and develop it for them and they just needed this as a summer job so that i could take care of some stuff.

So i started working with them and they loved the ideas and technologies that i introduced to their website so i got a offer of working hourly with them. But for some reason i didn't like it and that is due to thel working with Wordpress and i like to do everything with code so I thanked them for the opportunity but told them i got to focus on my studies.

Now 👨‍💻

Now i just got a internship offer in a German company to work on their website that is built on nodejs and express.

I made it clear for them that i have to focus on my studies so I am going to prioritize that and that i can only work im distance and they agreed so i have an interview with them tomorrow so if all goes well i might do a weekly series on working as an intern with that company.

So how i did it ?🤔

There are a couple of things that helped to get to this point but the most important thingst hat you have to focus on is.

1- build your self a reputation either by working for people or building open source projects and publish them so that you can show stats. This would show people that want to hire you what other people think about you.

2- Build your portfolio, small things like a JavaScript calculator or a application that uses a REST API would be really useful and in an other post i will talk about things that you can build to build up your portfolio.

3- It is not the quantity, rather the quality. Inseated of learning a lot of languages focus on learning one language really good until you feel like you can build anything with it.

I really hope that this was a nice read and that you enjoyed it. And please i am new to this so if there is any points of improvement just let me know, I am open for all feedback :)