Who am I

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Hello, my name is LARABA Mohammed Seddik, you can call me séddik, I am an Algerian developer, I live in a small town called Touggourt in the south of Algeria, my city is very very hot, who have no rain, no clouds, nothing at all; that's a bit annoying but I can live with it :).

I studied electronics, so I am a State Electronics Engineer, I have chosen to study this field just out of curiosity, it gave me a better vision of how computers and electronics really work on the low level, combined with my programming skills, I now can see things from two different perspectives, and most of the technology stuff became easier. As soon as I finished college, I formatted my whole hard drive and installed Linux, "so bye-bye electronics" tried too many things like building a Linux kernel, creating some utilities, the university was too hard, so I needed to enjoy my time before start looking for a job. As soon as that energy went away, I started getting bored, too much time creating utilities, and burying them somewhere in my computer.

After that, I've put my resume in a software development company called SmartSoft, where I worked for about 8 months as a software engineer creating software using C#, WPF, and SQL Server. then I went to the military service for a year and a half (it's an obligation here), I used that time to better explore programming architectures and techniques, read a lot of books, development, novels like sherlock holmes ..., sometimes one needs some time to reflect and study programming theoretically.

At that time I thought why don't create software and sell it, then I thought why not create an IT company that does everything like software and web development, hardware repair, solution to computers problems, IT consulting ( I didn't mention that I had pretty high skills with computers since I had about 15 yo, our father bought us a computer back in about 1998), my only problem was I hadn't a penny, thanks to my father again who bought me an i7 laptop in 2012.

I had a computer, my next target was a potential client, I had a neighbor who had a computer store who encouraged me and asked me to create a store management software for him. As I had gained experience in this domain, I finished and delivered my first software, but unfortunately, he didn't use it, because he was not well organized and used to work manually just selling and buying stuff, no accounting nothing ..., It was a little depressing for me because It was like my first newborn child :D, after some days I had another potential client, he was a bigger client, he had a "pharmaceutical wholesaler" I went there and nailed it, I had a product to show, I showed them the store management software, but this one had a different approach, I've made the software for this client, and he was totally satisfied, he is using the software until this day happily.

I started tackling more domains and fields like schools, restaurants, gas stations, small management for factories, ... as my software was bugless, thanks to its architecture, and my core libraries were updated once I found a bug in one of my other products.

After that, I began working officially by creating my small enterprise named legally "OptimIT", started growing slowly as I didn't have any business plan or funding, so work then spend it all, but it wasn't a good way to run a business, sometimes the safe was full of money and sometimes it was spider's web empty. The hard part was when it was empty I had to make money in any way possible, even if I create software at a very low price, which takes too much time and effort, and prevented me to search for more profitable projects, two or more bad decisions takes about three months of work, which hurts a lot and depressed me many times.

I changed my strategy, followed some articles about business management, now my company has grown up with three other employees, two with sales, and one helping me in development, we do cover software, web and mobile development and I couldn't be happier, I plan to raise our sales, and grow steadily in the next two years, to have about 8 employees, and fixed high revenue.

My dream is to be an independent developer so I can work from anywhere anytime, create some great, easy-to-use, and affordable products for everyone without any complexity.

Location: Touggourt, Algeria

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