Hi, I am Fahad Mahmood (A WordPress Mechanic) the developer of a few famous WordPress Plugins like Keep Backup Daily, Alphabetic Pagination, jQuery Post Splitter, RSS Feed Widget and a recently launched WordPress Plugin WP Header Images. My journey started from a HTML tag <marquee></marquee> which I learned very first even before <html> and <body>. It was really inspiring for me when text was moving from right to left. As notepad was available everywhere so i did a number of experiments in my college’s computer lab during my ICS session 2001. My interest became a passion when I learned about click event of a button in visual basic 6.0. It was purely a magic when I played with it and successfully changed document title, button text, label captions and text in textboxes. Eventually I stepped into era of ASP classic in 2004. I bought a book published by wrox and started from a, b, c of it and almost completed it within 2 and a half months. For almost 1 year I practiced ASP classic with notepad and after that I joined a software house 4Dee.net. I was aware of PHP but wasn’t sure that it is much in demand and I will be asked to continue on it. I cleared the interview and then started development in PHP for the very first time as deliverable work. I experienced a loop of new technologies and mix of scripts. Sometimes I was working on PHP and sometimes I was fixing issues in Action-scripting. That initial learning of IF, ELSE, SWITCH, FOR and WHILE helped me a lot. DO WHILE seldom used in projects but FOREACH replaced the FOR loop mainly. I continued my core PHP development experience for almost 5 years and then I tried to upgrade myself and learned smarty and codeigniter one after one. I was equipped enough with troubleshooting skill in 2008 when I joined a team which was purely working on symfony with doctrine. They asked me to start and convert it to propel, it was a nice experience that’s why I still miss symfony because I couldn’t work on it alone. Its not good thing that a few frameworks are not preferred when you are working alone. In PHP projects you mostly work alone. After tasting a few PHP development frameworks I loved to explore cake and kohana but codeigniter was king at that time for small/medium projects. Then I heard about WordPress but never bothered about it. Later in 2013 I joined a team which was delivering the WordPress based solutions, so I started fixing the issues for them on daily basis. Meanwhile I was working on my very first plugin Keep Backup Daily, the idea behind was to secure your database on daily basis instead of getting worried after being hacked. People loved it and especially small databases were really easy to email as an attachment so it was an encouragement for me to do more. Alphabetic Pagination was an accident because a client was requiring a simple CSS selector based page position navigation but I didn’t took it casually and developed a plugin for dynamic custom posts, which was a futuristic solution of complex problems. Now its pro version is available too and people love to use it with shortcode facility. I still feel that started with problem solving and these plugins are nothing but compilation of those snippets of my code which I delivered in pieces occasionally. I feel that I couldn’t serve the open source community/platform with even 10% of my work yet. I have a huge number of delivered codes which can be reused but its really hard to get a snippet and makeup it a plugin or widget for WordPress. I served IT industry as a Software Engineer for 9+ years and then started offering services directly to the clients. I couldn’t create an awesome profile on odesk, elance, freelancer and other platforms. I still feel hard to bid on a project, I am just continuing by understanding the problems and try to provide the solutions. But its really fascinating for me when I get an email about my plugins sale or I get a support query even on my free plugin. Every client is valued for me, doesn’t matter he is using a pro version or free. After such long journey I realized that I am not a developer but a mechanic who fix the problems, a software mechanic which turned into WordPress Mechanic by the time.
Website Design Website Development is a blog managed by me. I tried to segregate the important features which are commonly ignored in the website design and the website development. By missing or misunderstanding basic points in project requirements may put the business reputation on stake and ultimately it will lead to customer dissatisfaction. To point out those segments and especially to guide the users, web designers, web developers and also SEO personnel i have taken this step to write. Your feedback will play a vital role to continue further. Most of the articles and code is shared by me and i am working on web based applications since 2005. A couple of articles are randomly written by my colleagues.
Thanks,
Fahad Mahmood
If you don’t get a project for 1 week but you are solving the problems of others on daily basis then one day you will be in the situation that on daily basis you will be getting a number of projects but you won’t be able to advise others for free even on weekly basis.
Last updated: April 30, 2016
