My Story

I was born in 1991 in Alexandria Egypt

Loved playing video games from a very young age

Had summer jobs every summer since middle school (feeding a giant printer in a notebook factory, packaging biscuits, delivering newspapers)

Tried to draw while in high school and it turned out pretty well - DeviantArt

Studied information systems in the higher institute of Abu Kir after spending a year studying law then deciding that it's not for me

Traveled to Cairo after graduation to work in a call center and live on my own (was very excited about it)

Another call center job after a year

Went back to Alexandria after two years in Cairo and worked in another call center there

Got engaged

and needed more money

So I went to Dubai on a one month visit visa looking for a job, betting with all I got on my luck and skill

And got another call center job

While I'm there I was looking for a photographer and a makeup artist for my wedding, the market for those was complete chaos, which gave me the idea to build a more organized platform

And I started building Setch the artists platform, with very little coding knowledge using PHP, MySQL, and javascript

Spent three months working on the idea, learning more about programming on the way

My programming skills couldn't automate artists' registration at that time, and I had to write the values in the database by hand

I learned a lot from the project and eventually let it go, the project still lives here https://setch.000webhostapp.com/

after a year of working in a call center in Dubai, I went back to Egypt and got married

one month after marriage I joined my fifth call center while studying programming mostly on https://www.freecodecamp.org/

A new hope: admission to ITI was opened, a 9 months government-funded programming boot camp that would guarantee to get a good programming job afterward, however, there was a catch (or a few), I can't have a full-time job during those 9 months, my wife was pregnant, and only people graduated in the last 5 years can apply, and it was my fifth year after graduation already

Got accepted, quit my last call center job with no clear financial plan on how we will spend the next 9 months

Upwork to the rescue: freelancing on that platform turned out to be a great way to study and a fine source of income

My daughter was born: Fairouz

Went back to Dubai after finishing ITI, but with neither full-time experience nor projects to show off, I failed to find a job and went back to Egypt

Got my first programming job within a week of returning to Egypt as, Frontend Developer at Qurba, developing a big platform from scratch (thanks ITI!)

A few months later I moved to the Netherlands, joining Sendcloud as a Frontend Developer

And after more than a year of working at Sencloud I moved to Amsterdam and started working at ABN AMRO bank

Everything I've been through taught me to appreciate where I am now and having the opportunity to do what I love, thank you for staying until the end