How seemingly “solved problems” in technology keep repeating themselves, and how developers keep falling into the trap of reinventing the wheel — It’s interesting and somewhat frustrating that the challenges I experienced leading small teams in small companies are the same challenges in leading teams of hundreds in large enterprise businesses! The interesting part is recognizing the patterns shared across all these experiences and creating solutions that scale up and down to…

Would you erase part of your identity for some peace of mind? — Did you opt to have Damascus appear as your place of birth? My friend asked me today, He’s also a Syrian-Canada Citizen. We grew up together in Damascus, Syria. He’s now filling a form to renew his Canadian passport. Just as my parents did, his family immigrated to Canada long…

We met up with Luke at Full Stack Toronto Conference and invited him to do an AMA with the Tech Masters Community. Luke is a co-founder and partner at http://humblespark.com. He helps build the Elm community. Since Elm is steadily gaining popularity, Luke gave us a proper introduction. How did you get into the Elm project? Good starting…

A startup leadership lesson from the 7th century — In 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad, (for whom Gibraltar is named) crossed the Strait from northern Africa, with his army of about 7,000 and embarked on the conquest of Spain, establishing the foundation for a Kingdom that lasted nearly a millennium! Facing an army of 100,000 upon landing, he ordered his…

An online community tying together a diverse and passionate group of developers, technologists, and entrepreneurs from all around the world — TechMasters was created in late 2014 as a place where a bunch of friends and co-workers from the Toronto tech scene would come together and share technology news, lessons learned, and help each other debug problems. …

Professional Growth & Experience through time and knowledge in the workplace trenches — Your work life, much like life itself, will take you through a journey of adventures, experiences, successes and failures. Each one will teach you new lessons, expand your knowledge, and in the process make you stronger even though it may not seem that way to you at the time. …

Breaking new grounds with Canadian OSS influencers ❤ — Earlier this month Microsoft Canada hosted an event titled “Open Source Connection” gathering a number of “influencers” from the Canadian development community. I’ll be the first to admit, the words “Open Source” and “Microsoft” are not ones I’m used to saying in the same sentence, so when the invite arrived…

As part of my application to the Founder Institute, I was posed the question: “Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?” Considering the way I have, and continue to live, the answer for me was simple: “What else can one be?” This is a retelling of some of my…

This is my Syrian passport. To me, it represents the most significant milestone in my life: Leaving home behind and immigrating to Canada; It represents opportunity and the future. Leaving home behind wasn’t easy, and although I had my immediate family along with me, my full family extends to aunts…