About Mohammed Al-Mahdawi

Senior Engineering Manager, Infrastructure and Operations

Hi! this is Mohammed, it all started when my father bought me a PC because I got a high degree at school and since I had no brothers and sisters back then this PC became my whole life.

The internet was not good back then in my home town so you have to buy paper books and magazines to learn most of the things and I wanted to learn how this PC works!

I got books about how to build computers and about how to program them, my first programming language was Basic & QBasic then Visual Basic then C++, and so on.

I was a child and my uncle was a doctor and he is working as a hospital manager, he was taking me to the hospital to fix its computers(for free) because there was no IT section in the hospital back then.

Then my passion for these machines started to pay me off when I was able to sell the code that I wrote and get money by offering services and from then until now it becomes my career.

In this industry, I’ve occupied many titles: Owner, Founder, CEO, CTO, COO, Team Leader, Consultant, Technical Director, Senior Lead Developer, Lead Software/Cloud Architect, Senior Programmer, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, and so on.

I’ve built almost everything in this industry starting from simple plugins to architect, building, and leading big Microservices Multi-tenant SaaS projects that are run by teams.

I always take the company that I work with to the next levels! one of the many examples is in one of the companies that I worked in I found they have big awards web application they are maintaining for a government and whenever the awards time come the web application slow down and almost stop working I suggested to convert this monolithic application to microservices and replace the current database with scalable one and use Kubernetes as an orchestrator and the results was incredible, yep you are right because of this I got promoted to technical director 😉

The DevOps and the programming were in parallel in my life, I always think how to involve the computer to automate everything, I was doing DevOps since the first days of having a computer.

In my college(here is the surprise I had a bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering!), I was the best student in the computer class and my final project was a desktop application written in Visual Basic called “Multiuse” I put everything in this app starting from a simple “Word” clone to Mechanical Engineering related capabilities like dynamic calculations and strength of materials equations solvers with drawings and so on, it wons the best programming project!

Also, I was Award-nominated Prime Minister of the creative work.

After knowing everything about computers I started to explore servers, hypervisors, the internet, and the cloud and here we are you are reading my story so I probably succeeded in what I love!

You know what I’ll stop here, I’ll not put my entire history on the internet you know the social engineering and other creepy stuff, want to know more about me don’t hesitate to contact me 😉

11/21/2022 - Senior Engineering Manager, Infrastructure and Operations(Unifonic)
03/01/2021 - Head of Infrastructure(Akaunting)

Few Achievements

  • Building a backup & migration solution that suits Akaunting needs.
  • Building a CI/CD platform called Envoyer that suits Akaunting needs.
  • Converting Akaunting cloud service from a legacy application running on a single server that is hardly attached to it and can't handle anymore the fastly growing size of the user base to a highly available, volume-less respectful cloud-native citizen application that can scale to handle any number of user base and can migrate with clicks to any cloud vendor(removing the vendor lock-in) and automate any everything around this process.

03/01/2019 - Technical Director(LARSA IT LLC)

Few Achievements

  • Leading multiple teams that work on many governments and enterprise projects.
  • Give consultancy to everything.
  • New projects review and approval.
  • Technical interviews.
  • Leading the team that manages Larsa's and its clients' clusters & infrastructures.
  • Head of Infrastructure.
  • Head of Software Development.
  • Architect, build and lead Larsa's Microservices Multi-tenant SaaS project(LARSA Cloud) which is the biggest project that Larsa ever made and it is the base for the current and upcoming Larsa's projects.

2018 - Founder(AVENTUM)

Because of the growing requests for building web/mobile/desktop applications we needed one tool to make our life easier!

Few Achievements

  • Maintain clusters, servers, hypervisors, and DevOps workflows for our clients.
  • Use Aventum to build the APIs for our clients' applications.

2016 - mid of 2018 - Founder/SRE/DevOps/SENIOR LEAD DEVELOPER(AppsArtisans & MOSTASHAROON with other local companies)

Few Achievements

  • The client base became bigger and a few local companies requested our services.
  • The infrastructure that we maintain for ourselves and our clients became bigger.
  • Start containerizing everything.
  • Converting some servers to clusters.
  • We started accepting varieties of projects like mobile and desktop applications.
  • Founding AppsArtisans.

2014-2016 - Author(Envato)

Few Achievements

  • Release a few WordPress plugins on the Envato market exclusively using this account and non exclusively using this one.
  • Release free plugins on WordPress.org and theme.
  • The client base grown more and more.
  • Some clients trusted us and offered us to manage their infrastructure as well as build custom tools for them.

2013-2014 - Founder(MOSTASHAROON)

WordPress was a trend back then so I established a company that offers services and products related to anything WordPress!

Few Achievements

  • Learned how to found a company and establish a new business.
  • Building and managing the whole thing starting from the hypervisors to the websites.
  • Building a client base consisting of hundreds of clients from all over the world that cause to increase my relationships.
  • Start building a capital.
  • Leading a small team.

2012 - Mechanical Engineer(few companies)

After my graduation and getting my Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, I worked as a Mechanical Engineer in a few companies. Meanwhile, I kept working on my computer hobby after working hours. Also during this period I traveled into another country as an intern, I was one of the two persons selected to be an intern in this internship!

2011 - Mechanical Engineer

Don't be confused, what you are reading is correct, I got my Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering but my hobby and my work that makes my living are in the computers field. Also I became a member of the Engineers Union.

2004-2011 - Computer Science(self-taught)

I studied everything about computers' hardware & software also many computer languages(e.g. Basic, QBasic, C, C++, Visual Basic 6.0, Visual Basic .NET, etc.).

0 %
Kubernetes
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Python
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Docker
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Linux
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Helm
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AWS
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Terraform
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Ansible
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Packer
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Jenkins
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Kafka
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Vault
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Prometheus & Thanos
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Drone CI
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ArgoCD
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OpenSearch/Elasticsearch
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Cloud Technologies
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Node.js
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Go

Testimonials

My clients love me! But don’t just take my word for it – read testimonials!

Every year when the time comes we start nervous and worry about what will happen with our international award system, it is a big Java application that almost stop working when the load on it becomes high, with the help of Mohammed we don't worry anymore! Our app now can scall to serve millions of concurrent users!
We have a special case, our SaaS application is complicated, with hundreds of plugins, so nothing from the usual CI/CD tools worked for us, we were doing everything manually, testing, building, deploying, and so on for the main app and for each plugin! Mohammed build a CI/CD platform for us! yes, what you read is correct! he build a CI/CD platform for our use case, and now everything is automated!
Our infrastructure was a mess, the downtimes were something usual, multiple servers to manage, broken backups, outdated apps, and so on, when Mohammed came everything changed! Even though Mohammed takes care of everything but we like it when we log in to the cluster dashboard(yes we have a cluster now!), the monitoring solution, the backup solution, we really can sleep well now!
We have big enterprises and governments clients with millions of users, and we used to build a standalone app for each system they wanted, and the cost of maintaining too many standalone apps is too high and came with way too many problems, Mohammed saw this issue and suggested us to build a microservices multi-tenant SaaS platform that serves all our clients needs, he architect, lead, and built this platform and now after three years of happy clients without issues it is the most successful platform that we ever made!