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Ahmed Ibrahim’s motivational journey to WPML Integration Developer

April 21, 2021

Irina Sozonova

Ahmed, tell us about yourself 

My name is Ahmed Ibrahim, I was born and currently live in Alexandria, Egypt. My family consists of four members, one of whom is my little sister, and I’m engaged and will be married soon. When I was 18 years old I moved to Cairo to join the faculty of Computers and Information. I spent about 8 years there studying and working. I intended to continue my life there, because Cairo is the capital of Egypt and has better job opportunities than Alexandria, but afterwards I joined OTGS and moved back to my lovely home town Alexandria.

With my fiancé hanging out by Alexandria beach. 

When did you start and what was your exact position?

I joined OnTheGoSystems in April 2015 as a 1st Tier supporter for the WPML Support Team. I soon moved to 2nd Tier Support, where I was able to use my experience in PHP development to help the developers rapidly find and fix issues.  

After a while, OnTheGoSystems established the Translation Proxy applications to connect WPML clients with translation companies in order to translate their WP sites, so I was asked if I would like to join the TP team as a supporter. This was challenging for me because the TP application uses Ruby on Rails, so I had to learn how to deal with Rails Apps, but I liked the idea so I accepted the new role and started to learn the basics of Ruby.

I liked Ruby, and I became eager to learn more about it. I wanted to join the development team, so I asked Sarah, our team leader, and now she helps me a lot by assigning me small development tasks. I become more confident and gain more experience every day. 

Riding a horse by Giza Pyramids. 

What do you do now?

For now, my title is WPML Integration Developer and I help to maintain and improve our 4 TP rails Apps. I’m responsible for leading the translation service support and helping our clients who are using WPML send content to translation services. I also integrate translation companies to become WPML partners and train them to understand how the integration works, as well as help them with any technical issues.

How did you grow into this role? What led up to it?

I was able to grow because I get a lot of help from my leaders and colleagues who have more experience than me. They always love to help, so they make it easy for me to learn and gain more experience day after day.

Are you content in your role now? What motivates you?

Yes, for sure. I love programming, and as I’m working on a big and widely used application, which has a good reputation like WPML, I feel the responsibility to always improve myself so I can provide the best service for our clients to help them compete in a very competitive market like WP. 

It’s always a work in progress to try to better our position and compete as a company in a very competitive market.

With my colleagues Ahmed and Mohamed in WCEU Berlin. 

In short, what advice would you give someone who wants to grow within the company?

Do not settle in your comfort zone. We are a big company in a very competitive market, so always stretch your skills and try to benefit from the friendly environment that we have to grow and learn more. Never hesitate to ask if you need help… In the end, there is no such thing as a stupid question ;)

With my friends in Dahab by the Red Sea.

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