I was initially hired there as a senior software engineer and all I was thinking about was to write lots of code. At first I researched a couple of Java web frameworks when suddenly I was assigned to lead a team of 12 bright fresh graduates to work on a network of websites for a high-traffic community. That was my first leadership experience and albeit the high number of juniority on the team, we managed to deliver a vast array of content-based websites using a single PHP/Drupal code-base. Fortunately, projects that I took over later on ranged from 2 to 4 team members which is more sane for proper leadership.

Next came my experiences with Java, Spring MVC, JPA/Hibernate and Maven web development which was through the following projects.

• Design and implementation of a media center serving different multimedia types to different websites, including flash videos (using FFMPEG).

• Design of a mobile trivia website backed up by a foreign SMS gateway.

• Maintenance of an in-house HR management system responsible for timesheets, attendances, appraisals, …etc.

I then ventured into in-house research-oriented projects built using Python/Django.

• Design and implemention of a web application that aggregates lots of performance measurements and syslogs from Nagios , Collect Daemon and RSyslog.

• Design of a web application that leverages external command-line security tools to scan our production servers.

I also managed to keep running 30 internal supporting systems serving the employees in a well maintained state by writing automation and cleanup scripts in addition to troubleshooting application problems. To aid in monitoring services, I implemented extensive machine and service level monitoring of the internal and production systems using Nagios which I had to write further custom Nagios plugins to measure our internal OpenVZ-based virtual machines performance and other miscellaneous ones.

Sparked out of the desire to venture into running my own startup, I have delved into this experience with 4 of my colleagues and we started working in a part-time manner on a pharmaceutical software product which targeted quite a niche in the pharmaceutical field. I designed and implemented significant parts which were written in Java, Hibernate, Struts 1 and SiteMesh. After a year of hard work on this product, we managed to deliver it successfully and celebrated this achievement.

Throughout the first year, I also established the development supporting systems such as the version control system, issue tracker and continuous integration system in addition to supporting the development team with the necessary training and technical consultancy.

I then worked on the initial prototype of a second pharmaceutical web application where we experimented with the amazing Play! Framework to accelerate our pace.

After the first launch of the in-house issue tracker, many requirements have popped up (isn’t this typical !). Which led us to rewrite major parts of the issue tracker to cope with the needed changes in preparation for the second release. After the second release was successful, I joined some outsourced work using the Jupiter CMS as follows:

• Implemented most of the HR workflows at Etisalat Egypt using the Jupiter CMS during the outsourcing period which lasted for 6 months.

• Leveraged Gant to automate most of the build steps needed when building custom applications to the Jupiter CMS.

The first couple of months I have implemented numerous workflow processes for several clients using our Jupiter CMS and the Oracle Workflow Builder. At the same time I have managed to enrich the CMS’s UI with complex JavaScript validations and manipulations which I opted to build them using jQuery and it’s plugins. Throughout the CMS support visits, I have been troubleshooting the production issues of the Jupiter CMS implementations along with it’s backing Oracle databases. During my work on Jupiter and out of self-motivation I have written initial Groovy bindings to the CMS SDK which facilitated quick prototyping and the ability to actually script the CMS.

Later on I joined a team to build an in-house issue tracker using Java, Struts and JDBC to automate the ticket and bug tracking in a special workflow between the different departments. Later on, this in-house project turned into an official product which was sold several times.

My first job was involved with the operation and automation of EDS’s mainframe cost allocation system which was based on IBM mainframes and DB2 databases. In order to minimize the manual tedious revisions, I started writing several automation applications in C# and VBA that analyzed large log files and sheets in order to perform critical validations on the collected data that was pulled from the production mainframe environments. Towards my final days at EDS, I was on the verge of launching mainframe batch jobs from our PCs through the FTP servers running on the mainframes. Throughout this period, foreign teams were working with us in order to cover the whole operation cycle.