Ahmed Shadeed - Influencer and Major Contributor in the Web World
Shadeed joined the Arab American University and studied the Bachelor of Multimedia Technology program between 2010 and 2014. He started working as a freelance graphic designer with local companies. Starting his career early, and in 2012, he established his personal website ishadeed.com, after winning a cultural competition on the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology page.
In 2013, Shadeed designed an educational infographic for the "Arab Web Days" project launched by Google Middle East, Wamda, and others. It did not stop there, but Ahmad started learning CSS and building a daily exercise immediately after his graduation. He continued to do so until he reached 1032 consecutive days without any break. In this way, he gained great and deep experience in CSS. Shadeed continued to work with Wamda and work on side projects until 2020, after which he founded his project Uxable to provide website and application design services to startups locally and globally.
In 2019, Shadeed launched the RTL Styling Guide, which is an explanation of how to write CSS and design websites in Arabic for non-native speakers. This guide received great attention and became the first and most important source and was used by global companies such as: Porsche, Volvo, Skoda, Samsung, Chegg, Orange and many others. This encouraged him to write on his own blog about CSS topics and it received great response from the web community with an average of one million visits to the blog annually.
In 2020, he launched his book Debugging CSS, the first book in the field of discovering and analyzing CSS writing errors. More than 3,000 electronic copies were sold and more than 90 countries around the world purchased it. As such, Shadeed was invited to participate in the Web Directions conference (the most famous conference for designers and developers in Australia) where he spoke about the topic of his book.
In 2021, Shadeed was invited again to the Web Directions conference, and during the conference he met the founder of Smashing Magazine. He also received an invitation from the Figma team (the most widely used tool by designers around the world) to try out Arabic writing support in their application.
In 2022, Shadeed published the project and term Defensive CSS, which is a defensive design of websites to avoid problems that may occur in the future. He was invited to speak on the subject at four international conferences in France, Jordan, Finland and Australia.
In 2023, he received the Google Developer Expert badge in the CSS & UI branch, and he is the first Palestinian and Arab to receive this badge, in the State of CSS Survey. He also ranked 7th among the most influential and contributing people in the web community and the world of CSS due to his many and various articles.
Shadeed says to the students of the Faculty of Information Technology
To learn a new skill, you have to commit and persevere. Thirty minutes a day can make a big difference. I learned CSS this way, it changed my life, opened new horizons for me, and I am still learning now.
