My Guaraná Experience: Omran on Joining the Team

One of our newest members of the team, Omran Aleid, joined Guaraná Technologies last month as an iOS developer. Originally from Syria, Omran, his wife and baby came to Canada in November 2017 as the situation worsened in their home country.

Omran graduated in 2015 from Damascus University in Syria with a Bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Information Technology Engineering. He then began a Masters degree a year before coming to Canada but was unable to finish it because of how quickly Syria was deteriorating. Upon arriving in Canada, Omran was quick to take French courses and passed the first two levels. Afterwards, he began looking and applying for work, he said, “I am now so happy to work with Guaraná.”

After graduating university, Omran worked at an IT help desk as a network engineer for 3 months, but he was not a fan of this type of work. Later, while still living in Syria, he decided to take online iOS development courses from the University of Toronto on the Coursera platform and worked for a company based in Qatar for two years, he said, “With the situation in Syria, there was no chance to find good work. So I had to find work that I could do from home.”

His passion for app development only grew from there, he said, “I think working with code is a very good way to spend my time. I love to make good apps that are user-friendly. Now the world depends on applications. Everyone has a smartphone and wants to do everything with an app. I think this is the future.”

At Guaraná, Omran works on the UI (user interface) integration for iOS applications, making the design and building the logics for the screens. Omran really appreciates the opportunity to work with Guaraná, he said, “I think Guaraná has about 82 apps in app stores, so it’s a great chance to work with a company that produces a number of apps like this. So I can acquire experience through other senior developers. It’s a good point to work with developers like them.”

Since working here for the past month, Omran has learned a lot like new UI components to work with, using GiHub and working with the task management site Asana, to organize and track his work.

In terms of what he hopes to learn in the future, he wishes to grasp how to work with social applications, getting experience with offline storage and learning Node.js. Like in our last interview with Raphael, Omran also likes to use tools such as Sketch, Xcode, Stack Overflow for finding solutions with other developers and Swift for iOS development.

Omran is also a supporter of hybrid applications, but only for the small and simple apps. He has tried learning the hybrid programming language Ionic, but prefers working with React Native, he said, “I think it’s a good point to learn a language that produces on many platforms. So you can write one code for Android and iOS and web.”

As we neared the end of our interview, Omran had a positive message for future developers, he explained, like with any job, that to become a developer, you should love what you do. “I like iOS development because I like the way iOS applications are built. So I like to produce apps with love.”

For more information on the difference between hybrid and native applications and their programming languages check out chapter 2 of our app development handbook for the non-tech savvy.