Dear Quincy (@ossia) and Team (@freeCodeCamp),

Today, I have officially completed five enriching years with our fantastic non-profit. This is the longest I have been at any organization in my career.

I want to reflect and express my heartfelt gratitude:

I started as a contributor eight years ago. I was getting into JavaScript, a language I love now.

Working for an MNC, I needed to skill up in Web Dev. Contributing was the best way to reinforce my knowledge.

My first PR was a simple typo fix :)

A few months later @Rexitas invited me to the core team.

No one asked me to, but I would spend a few hours each day working on the codebase outside my regular job.

I found that I really enjoyed it and eventually became very passionate and proud of my contributions.

A few years later, you (Quincy) asked if I would join freeCodeCamp as a staff engineer.

This was a rare gesture, considering you still poured your savings into this organization. We had a paltry budget back then.

But this gesture changed and shaped my career in hindsight.

We had only five staff members, including you. Of course, I could not have blinked an eye before saying yes!

I was happy about leaving my years of corporate life behind and embarking on this adventure, where I get to work on open-source and free education for all.

You and the community trusted me with the tools and opportunity to make a difference. I am grateful for your trust.

My first task was helping ship a major release in 2018. So huge that I forgot to announce I had become a staff.

I was nervous about the responsibilities.

https://twitter.com/raisedadead/status/1004497071645155328

Since then, with your guidance, I have come a long way in helping manage the infrastructure and helping forge strong relationships with some of our partners.

Looking back, I do not think I could have done this in my past jobs. Thank you for your trust and mentorship!

I am immensely proud of our accomplishments together during these years. The most beautiful thing about the team and the community is it continues to pay it forward.

It's a circle.

https://twitter.com/Rexitas/status/1357550812734492673

From one VPS on DigitalOcean years ago to running dozens of servers on multiple clouds today, scaling our infrastructure to handle well over a million users daily was a tremendous feat that would have been impossible without our team's unrelenting support and dedication.

Here is what freeCodeCamp's traffic looks like today compared to that over a year. This excludes traffic to @devdocs

I could not have learned to manage much of this without this opportunity and support.

https://twitter.com/raisedadead/status/1542100073458200577

We worked relentlessly, adopting innovative approaches and utilizing cutting-edge technologies to ensure our services were always available to our users.

Last month we were up for 100% of the time.

https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1359125395803619328

We shipped dozens of enhancements and features, a testament to our team's technical skills and a validation of our relentless commitment to providing our users with a superior experience.

And we fought battles together against the giants to keep our resources free for all.

Last year I received recognition from a well-known publication. It was a pleasant surprise and served as validation of my efforts.

But I don't think for a minute if it would have been possible without the support of the team and the opportunities I have had.

https://twitter.com/raisedadead/status/1600565820249104384

You have all played a significant part in my journey here; I am genuinely grateful. Your confidence in my abilities has fueled my ambition and drive.

From being a fanboy of the community in the early days to being able to make decisions that affect millions of people, these five years have been a wonderful blend of challenges, triumphs, learning, and growth.

https://twitter.com/raisedadead/status/717033031442251776

I am fortunate to have been part of this journey and look forward to continuing to contribute to our organization's success in the future.

Thank you once again for your unwavering faith, guidance, and support.

Yours gratefully,
Mrugesh.

Celebrating 5 Years with freeCodeCamp - A Personal Reflection

Here is a life hack for your @hashnode blog. 

They have a nifty feature that lets you add custom CSS to your blog. Here is my home page (keep reading for more):

You can add styles to classes they provide on the dashboard, and it's as simple as that. 

Here is a link to the docs if you want to dig into how, where, and which of it: https://support.hashnode.com/docs/custom-css

You can save, preview, & publish the styles to your blog when you are happy.

But there is more.

You can use a Chrome extension like https://github.com/webextensions/live-css-editor, which lets you live-edit styles on the fly and then copy-paste it over to Hashnode's dashboard.

Playing with the blog homepage styles took me less than an hour. What do you think? Check it out here: https://hn.mrugesh.dev

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/raisedadead/RQDCzdP

Custom CSS for Hashnode with a live-edit Chrome Extension

I am going to live blog the process here for posterity.

Getting into the first hiccup already, ...!

"We couldn't update the system reserved partition"

Let's see. 

That's not fair because they said my device can handle the hype. I'll keep ploughing. 

Tried a bunch of things, off of internet. I thought it could be the bit locker encryption, but now I remember having messed with my BIOS settings for something related to WSL2 a few months ago. Can't remember what it was.

Looks like a full factory reset would be a best place to start off. Time to grab that Factory Recovery Boot USB, and some coffee.

Almost done with the very boring reset / recovery. But I am glad that I have a decent internet connection.

I will not cover any features in this thread, there are several videos about that already, but it is a refreshing take on UX at the very least. 

Going to go ahead and setup my dev tooling.

Good job, on this. Not the best when compared to Finder on macOS, but I will take it. 

Windows Package Manager (aka Winget-CLI), is a game-changer. It recently hit 1.0 and is pretty neat, I was able to get back all my installed apps in a jiffy.

This is Windows's answer to homebrew on macOS, and it's open-source of course.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-package-manager-1-0

But life is much better because I also discovered winstall a few days ago. Man, this made generating a quick list of apps and a script to go with it. 

https://winstall.app 