Ghadeer is a technologist and entrepreneur who worked as a lead software engineer at organizations such as Goldman Sachs and Harvard Medical School. As a Boston-based senior consultant, his projects have ranged from small to enterprise-level applications, and for companies in various industries, ranging from research institutes, financial services, and marketing and advertising companies.
Since he joined Codementor, Ghadeer has provided outstanding software development help through over 30 sessions – he received 5-star reviews in all of them. Ghadeer is part of CodementorX, our network of top software engineers available for hire.
What made you move from working at established organizations to the consulting world?
The best part of consulting is the ability to learn new skills, learn about industries, and meet new people. I have been consulting for over a decade and absolutely love it. I have had the great fortune to work on a wide variety of projects in a wide range of industries.
I’m passionate about solving people’s problems, and saving them time. If you can save 8 hours of work a week, you’ve saved yourself a day of work; time that you can use to work to grow your own business.
What are your favourite technologies, and why?
Ionic and Node.js are undoubtedly my favorite technologies to work with. Ionic allows me not only build an iOS and Android app, but a fully fledged website all using one codebase. Node.js is the winner when it comes to building out backend services and integrating with APIs. With a fraction of the time and effort, I’m able to build a fully fledged enterprise level server.
What are the most exciting projects that you’ve worked on?
Recently, I have been working with a local business to help them rebrand their entire website, build some tools to help them with some back office work, and soon we will be working on a mobile app together. The business focuses on grammar correction and helping students read and write better.
Another exciting project that I have been working on is a cross-platform mobile app that times how long you spend on certain activities and provides you with fine-tuned analytics to really dig into when and how you work best.
If you didn’t have to work for money, what would you do?
I would do exactly what I’m doing now, helping people build products and bring their ideas to life. Working with clients to bring their ideas to life is not only exciting but fulfilling.
What do you wish you knew when you started programming?
If your first inkling is to sit down and write a line of code, stop. Think about the problem you are trying to solve, the different use cases, the right approach to the problem. Businesses aren’t run without a business plan, buildings aren’t built without blueprints, and a good application cannot be built without proper design.
Recently, I was working on a feature of a money messaging app and made the mistake of putting finger to keyboard thinking that the new feature was trivial. I soon realized that I should step back and really think about the problem and the best way to architect and implement it.
What was your first encounter with technology?
This was in highschool in my computer science class, where we learned to program a robot to solve a maze. The mazes got more and more complex and so did our algorithms. It was my first real experience with solving a problem that I not only found fun but challenging. As the semester went on, I became enamored with finding solutions to solve different types of problems.
What is the first thing you ever built?
For my final project in highschool, I built a hangman game using JavaScript before jQuery was around. It was quite a challenge at the time and I had a lot of fun with it. I remember how difficult it was for me to swap images when the user chose a wrong letter, but at the same time, I was having a lot of fun learning and problem solving.
What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
Focus on your core competency, and never say you can do something that you can’t. You’ll not only disappoint people but you will hurt your reputation.
What tools help you be productive?
Trello – Great for task management
Jenkins – Automation Tool that has saved me at least months of time
Bitbucket – Code repository of choice
IntelliJ – IDE that supports all of my projects (Node.js, Ionic, Java, Python, etc).
PhotoShop – Great for prototyping wireframes
Slack – Makes team communication easy
My Notebook (Paper + Pen) – A bit old school, but helps me understand and think things through properly.
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