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 the 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.