Meet the Orbit Engineering Team: Mashkour Abdel Aziz

Welcome to the Meet the Orbit Engineering Team blog series! We're diving into learning about the awesome engineers at Orbit and what it's like to be a part of the team. Enjoy!

Today, we're chatting with Mashkour, a software engineer on the team based in Paris, France.

Let’s start with two truths and a lie about yourself.

1. I have a sister who is ten years younger than I am.
2. I’ve traveled to most parts of Africa.
3. I have 21 siblings sisters and brothers
   

Which statement was the lie above?

The lie is that I’ve traveled to most parts of Africa. 

Tell us about your path into tech and how you ended up at Orbit.

I have a passion for tech and software engineering, and I believe that tech and science can bring innovation to the world and make it a better place. Meeting Ulrich [Orbit engineering manager] at the beginning of my professional career, I realized that working for a start-up was the right way for me to jump on the opportunity of being in the tech world.

In addition, my passion for what users feel, experience, and think about a digital product guided me as I started to think about working as a front-end software engineer to contribute to improving user experience in a fast-growing ecosystem.

Finally, the connection I’d made with Ulrich gave me the chance to discover that he’d joined the Orbit team. From there, I applied to Orbit and was offered the opportunity I’d been looking for!

For me, Orbit is the perfect team for me to contribute to 💜

What does a typical day at work look like for you?

I usually start with a hot coffee and lemon between 9am and 10am Paris time. Sometimes, I can start earlier between 6am and 8am by reading tech articles from blogs or articles that have been shared in the Orbit team Slack channels) and checking my email notifications and any previous PRs changes. 

Finally, I write on a piece of paper what is my priority for the day and what I need to do to achieve it. 

This last step helps me realize what questions I need to ask in the process and then I get to work on my tasks. Happy workday at Orbit!

What’s a feature or project you’re most proud of that you worked on in the past three months?

The Advanced Members Tags feature, which gives Orbit users more nuance in searching through their members in Orbit based on tags. 

It gave me a lot of experience in the project source code, and it was the first big feature I worked on.

‍What’s your favorite thing about working at Orbit?

Working with everyone at Orbit is great, and there’s such an overall comfortable and positive feeling. My teammates are always available to help and give constructive feedback. 

Describe the type of person that would thrive as a member of Orbit’s engineering team.

An open-minded person, and someone passionate about taking his or her working experience to another level. Also, someone who is not afraid of to fail and ultimately learn from their experiences.

What is your current favorite gem, library, tool, or anything else that helps you with your work? Why?

My favorite tool is RSpec for testing because whenever there are changes that can break the app, the tests fail, and we can fix the failures before deploying in a production environment.

Lastly, where can people find or connect with you online?

People can find me on LinkedIn.

The latest buzz about Mashkour

We asked other Orbit engineers what it's like to work with Mashkour, and here are some of their responses:

"Mashkour is such a positive and optimistic teammate. If I'm stuck on an issue, he's happy to pair up and take a look together, and we've had some great strikes of inspiration while building certain features!" – Alex Morton, Software Engineer

"Mashkour is always eager to learn and challenge himself. It’s always fantastic seeing him take on a subject, dive in, surface to ask spot-on questions and challenge assumptions, and land on an elegant solution. He’s an all-around great colleague too! Always engaged, considerate, and cheerful." – Nicolas Goutay, Senior Software Engineer

"Mashkour is open-minded and it is very easy to work with him." – Basile Barrincio, Software Engineer

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Like what you're reading and curious about joining the Orbit engineering team? 👇