Hello World!

Sooooooooooooo. First of all, I believe introductions are in order. My name’s Zaid, though I commonly refer to myself as Nico online. The name originates from the anime Love Live and the character Yazawa Nico.

I started my journey into computer science at a very young age, starting with the Scratch block-based game language. I soon moved on to using HTML and CSS, building some standard simple, yet beautifully crafted websites (I had no idea there was a world of JSX out there). After a while, I discovered the world of Discord bots and was introduced to the Discord.js library.

I worked as a freelance Software Dev making Discord bots for tens of clients and ended up racking over a year worth of Discord Nitro. During this time, I also did content management work for a charity nearby, where I managed WordPress websites and Twitter/Facebook/Instagram pages. My biggest break came in 2021, during the pandemic, when I was introduced to Fiveable — a company dedicated to providing review material for all the AP subjects. I was astonished, to see a community of over hundreds of thousands of other AP students just like me working together to achieve that perfect 5 out of 5 score. I immediately knew right then and there that I wanted to work for this company, and I immediately applied for their Community Intern position. After making it to the second round of interviews, I ended up not getting the position (competing with over 30 other students for the role). Admittedly, I was pretty sad about it. I had put my all into those interviews, but I didn’t let that stop me from doing other things. I continued making Discord bots until I received an email three months later from the CEO of the company. It turns out my interviewer remembered me for my technical skills and referred me for an open position with the company’s first investor, 27 Ventures. I was offered an internship as a Business Operations Intern. I was hyped as hell about it. After working for two weeks, I saw a message in the Fiveable Discord that intrigued me. It was a position for an Open Source Internship at Fiveable. Having contributed to various open-source projects myself, I was over the moon at such an opportunity and applied immediately. A couple of days later, I received a text from who would end up being one of the best bosses I’ve ever had, Mr. Levin. He wanted to hop on a call and discuss my interest in the position. However, it ended up turning into a graphQL and Hasura fanboy club meeting. It was the most relaxed I had ever felt in an interview, and it set the tone for the rest of my time at Fiveable. I got the position shortly after along with two other people and we formed the first-ever Open Source Collective at Fiveable. We worked on websites, bots, and whatever else the company needed and the public wanted. During this time, I also became a mod in the Fiveable server, and due to my extensive work on the community end of things, I was offered a spot on the Community Interns team — that’s right, the team I was initially rejected from I ended up getting an offer from!

At this point, I was working THREE internships at once and was slowly feeling burnt out. Thankfully, my internship with 27 ventures was due to expire and I was able to juggle the Open Source and Community stuff pretty well. This went on for a couple of months until the company make a breaking change, they were restricting dual roles from then on and limiting interns to one role at a time, forcing me to decide between my two greatest passions, community management, and coding. In the end, I chose to transfer to the Engineering team as a Software Engineering Intern and was soon transitioned into a Jr. Software Engineering part-time role. I worked in that position for the rest of the summer and into winter. I worked on all sorts of things, our frontend built with Next.js, our APIs and WS gateways built with Node, and DevOps work with Docker, I was a jack of all trades. After some time, I felt as though my time with Fiveable was coming to an end. I had spent so much time working that I had almost forgotten I was in my senior year of high school, an experience that (hopefully) only comes once in life. I decided I needed to refocus my priorities and left Fiveable and rested for a couple of months. During this time, I spotted a job offer on a community board to take up a Lead Content Moderator position at the Adobe Creative Career Discord Server and decided I’d apply for it. After a couple of rounds of interviews, I got the position and was able to use the skills I learned at Fiveable to grow the server. Towards the end of my senior year, I became more involved with Guilded and soon formed Yoki Labs, a collective of developers building all sorts of tools for the Guilded community. At the time of writing, we’ve built services like Yoki, Guilded.bio, and other private services.

And that leaves me with where I am today. It’s currently summer vacation and I will soon be attending university. I’m also returning to Fiveable for the summer. I’ve learned to relax a little more these days and spend time playing Valorant and other games. I manage several open-source projects like Guilded.js, Dark Matter Docs, and many others. As for what the future holds for me, I will never know. But I know that I’ll enjoy the ride while I can and go with the flow. Thanks for reading!