It's wild: Almost everything I worked on has become a great success on a global scale. I was struck by this fact earlier today when the news came out that Codecademy, where I was a founding engineer, is now a fast-growing business. The news came on the heels of our Series A announcement at Replit, where we shared some great numbers too. At Facebook, I was a founding engineer on React Native, which also had a fantastic last year. And all the open-source projects I've been part of -- Babel and Jest most famously -- became standard tools that measurably increased productivity and changed industries.
Across all my work -- the millions of developers we helped mint, the CS teachers we empowered, and the entrepreneurs we enabled -- I've probably had a significant impact on the world economy, perhaps even meaningfully increased productivity.
Reflecting on this, first, I'm grateful to be able to be useful on such a large scale. After all, just ten years ago, I was a kid in Amman who'd just graduated from university and was interviewing at random companies (including a cigarette factory for VB6 work that comes with a free carton of cigarettes a week).
Second, and more importantly, I think it's time to be more ambitious. With every project, I stopped short of what was possible. I let haters & doubters change my plans and assumed a sense of fake humility because that's what people expected.
The culmination of my work is Replit, where we're working to give people computer superpowers. We want to nudge the world away from rampant digital consumption to one where there are more creators and entrepreneurs. Anyone anywhere can participate in the digital economy and build and leverage software to better themselves and their communities.
Now that I've seen what's possible in a decade while starting from nothing, in this decade, I'd like to create trillions of dollars in value for the world in the form of better access to technology and tools.
My only regret is my mum is not here to see all this.