whois
I am Mahmoud Tantawy—obviously—and I am a backend web developer who started exploring the web through the developer’s eyes 10 years ago during elementary school, about 2004~2005, thanks to my tech-savvy parents, and some luck finding opportunities to get exposure and grow.
During school, I gladly had the chance to be exposed to many fields.
My father—may ALLAH bless his soul—being an electronics engineer, lectured me about many electrical engineering and electronics concepts, along with providing me with a very nice electronics training kit, and a very detailed explanation to how computers hardware work. My mother, on the other hand, being an electronics and communications engineer, introduced me to a variety of topics: computer networking, database design and normalization, MS Access through ORACLE.
Fast forward to first year at college, Ain Shams University, Faculty of Engineering, Communication Systems dept, 2007~2008, me reading about PHP, dynamic websites, and thinking to myself “That’s it! that’s what I want to do!” That’s when I decided to go in 2 roads, self-study everything about the LAMP stack, and join a LOT of student activities as a web developer to get exposure and get the chance to apply what I study and get feedback from others.
So, a couple of years later, so much exposure: PHP, Apache, MySQL, Linux, Ubuntu, Ubuntu-EG community, student activities in 3 faculties, 2 universities, successful web design & development workshop in Cairo University’s Faculty of Computer Science where I met my lovely wife, embedded systems, Beagle Bone, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, 1Sheeld, IoT, security, networks security, web apps security, you name it, and most probably I was exposed to it.
2012, graduated, and decided to leave behind my college study and pursue career as a backend web developer who practices both web development and system administration. I spent a year and 11 months in a corporate writing and maintaining sloppy code where the management’s focus was to only deliver on time—last time to work in such corporates.
November 2014, I joined robusta as a Senior PHP Developer, a mature digital marketing agency/startup that offers web and mobile apps services as well. My role was to develop and maintain websites and web apps using different technologies and platforms like WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and Laravel, all that, in a friendly encouraging environment, among friends full of passion and dedication, producing high quality code, and striving to differ by pushing each other to explore new technologies and apply best practices.
I bet by now you wonder what is the weird title of the post “whois”, so here it is.
According to Wikipedia:
WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase who is) is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system, but is also used for a wider range of other information. The protocol stores and delivers database content in a human-readable format.
In English, WHOIS is a service that is usually given a domain name (ex: mtantawy.com) and responds by all info about that domain, so, in a way, this post is like me responding to a WHOIS request asking about me—Mahmoud Tantawy.
Originally published on mtantawy.com