Feross Aboukhadijeh is a builder. At the age of 14 he taught himself HTML and built his first website. Before graduating high school, he began exploring other programming languages and launched APStudyNotes.com, a database of AP class notes and college prep material that, over a decade later, is still used by over 800,000 students in the United States every month.
“I always just liked to build stuff,” Feross said. “I enjoy the process and following a plan to make something exist out of nothing. I’ve never wanted to do anything else.”
Feross mantains over 100 popular open source code packages on GitHub and npm. His public packages are downloaded a mind-blowing 100 MILLION (!) times every month – and they’re all hosted on Linode. An outspoken advocate for open source and sharing, Feross believes it’s important to help others solve problems so they can create their own impactful innovations.
A year after earning his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, Feross and two former classmates built PeerCDN, a next-generation CDN powered by WebRTC for efficient peer-to-peer content delivery.
Yahoo! quickly acquired PeerCDN and brought Feross and his team onto their engineering staff. After a year on the job, Feross missed building his own projects and departed Yahoo! to set out on his own.
Since then, Feross has notoriously devoted most of his time to maintaining the 100+ open source code packages he’s shared on GitHub and npm.
He’s always been a fierce advocate of open source software, sharing everything he writes with the public.
“I began working on open source because it’s fun and, as I’m solving my own problems, I thought this could also be useful for other people so I started creating code packages,” Feross said.
His tireless open source efforts have earned him plaudits from all corners of the web.
Feross has also gained notoriety for his personal projects like BitMIdi, Play, YouTube Instant (which earned him a personal job offer from YouTube CEO Chad Hurley), the WebTorrent in-browser app, JavaScript Standard style guide, and so many more.
Feross is a longtime Linode customer – with over 400 referrals in the Linode referral program – who values the company’s simplicity and open source ethos.
“I was a kid when I found Linode so being able to SSH to a server for $10 was awesome,” Feross said. “It was so much simpler than anything else I looked at… I’ve never thought about switching.”
Feross wants to continue working on open source projects full-time. He cites full-time maintainers like Evan You and Sindre Sorhus as inspirations.
“So many people depend upon this source code and they don’t know where it’s coming from.”
