Osama Arshad

I'm a web developer with a strong focus on frontend development, and React has been at the center of my professional work for most of my career. I enjoy building interfaces that are not only functional and visually polished, but also accessible, responsive, and pleasant to use.

I originally became interested in Computer Science because of my interest in graphic design and the visual side of creating things for the web. I quickly discovered that a Computer Science degree involves a lot more code than I had anticipated, so I learned to embrace the programming side of it, and eventually found that it gave me the tools to build the things I was interested in in the first place.

If you look at the CSS documentation on MDN, you might think there isn't all that much to it. But believe me, things get considerably more interesting once different properties start interacting with and cascading over one another. It's one of those technologies that looks simple at first, but has a surprising amount of depth once you start digging into it and that depth is a big part of what makes it so enjoyable to work with.

Web accessibility is another area I'm particularly passionate about and consider one of my areas of expertise. One thing I have noticed over the years of working with clients is that people generally don't seem to care about it that much and frankly, I didn't either until I started learning about it. Now I believe a well-built interface should work for as many people as possible, regardless of how they interact with the web. Accessibility is something I try to consider as part of the development process rather than something to address after a product has already been built.

I'm also a massive fan of TypeScript and use it whenever possible. I appreciate the structure it brings to a project, especially as applications grow and become more complex. I've worked extensively with Next.js and have also explored Gatsby and GraphQL through some of my own projects.

More recently, many of my projects have been in the Web3 space, which has given me hands-on experience working with technologies such as Ethers, Wagmi, and Viem. And again, you combine Wagmi with TypeScript and the experience becomes so much more enjoyable. Wagmi's types and interfaces are so top notch this type of programming almost feels illegal! This experience has also given me a better understanding of the challenges involved in building responsive and accessible interfaces for decentralized applications, while still allowing me to work primarily from the perspective of a frontend developer.

I also care about writing reliable, well-tested code and have experience writing end-to-end tests with Cypress. For me, good frontend development isn't just about making something look right, it's about making sure it works well, remains maintainable, and provides a good experience for the people using it.

While frontend is where most of my professional experience lies, I'm also interested in understanding more of what happens beyond the browser. I've experimented with backend development using Node.js, Express, MongoDB, and GraphQL, but I consider this an area where I'm still learning about and growing in rather than my primary area of expertise.

I'm currently learning more about DevOps as well and the processes that surround taking an application from your local VS Code to an actual deployment that others can view. This is probably my weakest point right now but I have started with Docker and I am slowly scaling it up till I reach Kubernetes and I have read enough posts on Reddit to know that's a different monster altogether. Apart from DevOps, Observability is another thing that caught my eye and I never realized how important it can be. You don't just build a big project and then rely on people to report every single error to you. So, I have also started to work with tools such as Grafana and Prometheus to get an exposure to monitoring and observability and things have been going pretty well so far.

I can keep going on and on about what I have been upto and the technologies that I am experimenting with but I believe this has given you enough info about me to know I am serious about tech and I love working on it. All-in-all, I care about writing code that is clean, readable, maintainable, and capable of growing with the project. I enjoy learning by building, exploring technologies that interest me, and gradually expanding the range of things I can work on.

If you have a project in mind and think I might be a good fit, feel free to get in touch. I'd be happy to hear what you're working on.