Tarequl Islam

I was studying computer science and had never heard of Facebook. A friend said everyone was online except me, and I had to ask what “online” meant.

An older brother I knew helped me open an account. All I had was a button phone and a little mobile data now and then, and most of it made no sense to me yet.

Friends were forming groups to learn app development and web design. I didn't really know what those were, but I knew I didn't want to fall behind, so I picked web design.

I paid for the course with money saved from tutoring. My mother borrowed money from someone so I could buy a computer. After that it was practice at home every night: PSD to HTML, again and again.

I saw a job post on Facebook and sent my personal website as a sample. The interview was the same day my industrial attachment ended.

They gave me real work for a full day, then asked me back for another one. After those two days I had my first job offer.

Upwork rejected my profile about 20 times. I kept rewriting it until it was approved.

I worked my day job and took freelance projects from 10 PM. After four completed projects my Job Success Score was 100%, so I quit the job and freelanced full time for about two years.

I got married in 2019. Freelance income goes up and down, so I decided to go back to a full-time job.

I applied by email to a Facebook job post from a multinational company and used my Getwebinc and Upwork work as the portfolio.

It started as a remote job in a team of three. Our team lead was Bangladeshi, and after working together he became a friend. I recommended a friend from Creative IT, and when the company opened an office in Dhaka we worked from there, and sometimes still remotely. I kept freelancing alongside the job and started my first React work.

An Upwork interview turned into a full-time offer that was 10k BDT more than I had asked for. It seemed too good to be real at first, but I joined.

This is where I learned React properly: component architecture, Redux, and styled-components. I started as the only frontend engineer and later recommended a second one.

Our team lead moved to Germany and a few months later asked two of us to join him, so three old colleagues were working together again. We built the product remotely with GraphQL, Recoil, React and Tailwind, and the company raised a funding round.

After the raise, the company restructured around a new physical office in another country, and the remote team was let go.

Losing a team I cared about hurt. For five or six months I didn't apply anywhere.

A former colleague passed my résumé along, and I joined AsthaIT to work on the Toffee web app for Banglalink. It was my first on-site job after three remote ones, and I rode my bike to the office every day.

Corporate culture works very differently from remote startups, and I had to learn how to work in it.

A graphic designer from my first job introduced me to their client. The plan was two or three months of freelance work, but they offered me a full-time role the day after I delivered the first task.

I joined to do frontend and now work across the whole stack.