Introduction
I grow up in Tanta, Egypt, and I'm an Electric Communications and Electronics Engineer. Didn't I tell you my name yet? Oh, silly me. It's Ahmed El-Mahallawy.
The Very Beginning
Studying for an engineering degree was really boring for me. I didn't care much for studying Fortran and C in college. So, when asked "when did I start programming?", I never say in college.
First Step
I graduated in 2004 and worked in some engineering jobs that I didn't enjoy. In 2006, I was lucky 🤞 to be selected to work in a governmental Cairo, Egypt based company in the IT department. I did very well in the interview and exam, which led me to work in the GIS (Geographic Information System) section.
I was told you need to learn programming, I was thrilled and answered "Yes, I love programming".
Then, I started learning VB6 (Visual Basic 6) from a book. Then, it was time to write my own code without following book instructions. I was thinking I'm totally ready 😏 but found that coding is much harder than I thought, and googling information back then was so limited. I had to read a lot of documentation and practice by try and error. As a result, I learned VB6, ArcObjects SDK for VBA, Microsoft Access databases.
Second Step
After a while, I started gaining more confidence and exploring C#, WPF, PHP, MySql.
Learning more technologies helped me landing my second job in 2013 with the title Senior GIS Developer. It was in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, so I had to relocate with my family.
It was challenging, as I had to work with technologies I don't know such as Oracle database, ArcGIS Server, Silverlight, ArcGIS API for Silverlight, and I was up to the challenge.
My First Web Programming Job
In 2015, I got my third job and it was in Taif, Saudi Arabia with the title Expert GIS Developer. The job was all about web programming that wasn't my expertise. So, I had to learn more about HTML and CSS and take JavaScript more seriously. I also learned ArcGIS API for JavaScript, jQuery, Dojo Toolkit, Bootstrap, Node JS, Angular 2+, MongoDB, and Firebase.
What's Next
In 2018, I decided not to work exclusively in GIS, because of the lack of good working opportunities. I moved to a new company to lead a team to build some amazing web apps, but the company failed us 😰.
Nowadays
Now, I got back to Egypt and I have a stable job now as an Expert Web Developer. After the Covid-19 lockdown, I discovered a great community on Twitter for developers. This community showed support to me 🥰 and made me believe that I can contribute more to other developers in the world.
I started blogging here in Dev.to, shared some of my ideas in Codepen.io, taught JavaScript to some code newbies, and lately gave a talk about Node JS, and soon starting a coding channel on Youtube.
Check my Articles here in Dev.to 📝
If you like my tutorials, support me here 
and follow me on Twitter 
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