بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
My name is Ahmed Abd-el-Shafy Abd-Allah, and I would like to thank you for dropping by. I hail from Riverside, a city of towering palm trees and blue skies in the beautiful deserts of Southern California.
My current job is as the Chief Technology Officer in a small professional services company, Systematic, with offices in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. We occasionally outsource work to a sister company in Egypt as well.
My first love in the world of information technology is programming, and it is at the core of every other identity or role I have held in this field: "Program systems, I do."
My programming start came in the mid-1980's on an Atari 1200 XL ... and from there I have been blessed to add more skills, gain more insights, and take on bigger challenges. More than thirty years later, I have been a software engineer, solutions architect, systems administrator, devops specialist, cloud architect, and site reliability engineer. From a managerial perspective, I have been a team member, team lead, manager, director, consultant, and chief technology officer. I have always worked for small companies, however those companies have served some huge organizations - and I am grateful to say we have served successfully.
As I have grown older, my love of developing systems has not shifted entirely to the managerial or entrepreneurial side of things. While it is true that I have built companies, my core remains: "Program systems, I do." I have been hands-on all my career, and still remember the frustration of struggling with my first couple of programming assignments at Caltech (CS1 if I am not mistaken, in Pascal at the time), and the (more frequent) joy later as I humbly began to succeed at making code work (in Ada, assembly, awk, bash, C, C++, Go/Golang, Java, Javascript, Lisp, Perl, PHP, Prolog, Python, Visual Basic, and more). I still program... but with larger teams and more roles within those teams.
Please do contact me directly to explore how I can help solve your challenges 💡. Here are some areas in which I have been blessed with success with previous clients:
- help develop the business strategy for meeting business goals, and lead the development of the technical strategy to satisfy the business needs
- build technical solutions and companies around business needs from A to Z, from setting up the legal entity to designing technical architectures to hiring teams to delivering and operating solutions
- solutions architecting in multiple verticals (healthcare, telecom, government services, embedded systems) and across multiple layers (web frontend, application servers, databases, file server clusters, caching layers, identity and access management, monitoring, enterprise content management, and more)
- building cross-functional teams of backend software engineers, frontend software engineers, QA engineers, designers, system administrators, database engineers, and more
- design and slowly but steadily implement tailored software processes for onshore and offshore teams, emphasizing Agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban
- believe me, this area in particular requires "slow but steady"
You can find more details about my work experience and clients in my CV at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z9IU6Tsy3eDAVdX04k1EFmQgUNLq3dBhmEyLR6YKtok. Some very generous people have also gifted me with their recommendations at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YFIQlDXCTA1gaUGHtmr-nE2mSXSfLGNK63CRMO0ORZM/edit?usp=sharing. My LinkedIn profile (https://linkedin.com/in/ahmedabdallah) includes my CV and most of those recommendations.
And, of course, you can find some samples of my work over the years decades right here at github.
Finally, if you wonder why programming has remained so important for me and so many others, here is an article by David Intersimone - surely you know the company Borland? - on Why Programming is Fun. The main reason for me is the first one on Fred Brooks' list.
والحمد لله رب العالمين والصلاة والسلام على نبينا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه ومن تبعهم بإحسان إلى يوم الدين
