Unlocking Careers with Open Source: Insights and Opportunities with Abdelfettah Sghiouar – Techstrong Unplugged EP53

Welcome back to Textron on Unplug. My name is Cassandra Chin, and today we have Abdel Swa Tap. Can you introduce yourself?

Yes, Abdel Swa. Hi everyone. I am a developer advocate at Google.

I am originally from Morocco, where we are shooting right now. Uh, but I live in Stockholm, Sweden. So How did you get into technology?

Oh, boy, that's a very long story. Um, I, I guess the, the getting into technology was when my father bought me a computer at 14 years old. Um, that's the first time I had a computer and I was like, when I was a child, I was quite curious child.

I was quite like, I, IIII, I fully dismantled my parents' TV that they bought like six months after they bought it. I just opened it because I was curious to see how it works from in the inside. And when I, so back in the days in Morocco, it wasn't very common to have internet at home, so we would go to cyber cafes, uh, which I think they don't exist anymore.

Uh, but, um, so, so I, I, I spent a lot of my time going to cyber cafes, learning how to code mostly c plus plus and coming home and applying those learnings on my, my home computer. Um, and so that's how it started. And then eventually I finished my high school and I was not a really like brilliant student, uh, which is kinda related to your keynote yesterday about you don't have to be a genius to be in computer science.

Um, so I, I went to what we call, we call them here, a trade school. So it's the kind of schools where you typically, you would learn how to be a plumber or to be like a woodworker. And those schools also do computer science, right?

It's a two years degree. So it's, it's an associate degree, I think in America, um, where you would just learn, um, like a trade. So my first two years was telecommunication.

It's a lot of low level electronics, some programming. I did some assembly, which is wild. And then, uh, after that I went to another school, which is kinda the same idea.

I did another two years of programming, so pure programming. And then after that, that I went and got some masters, um, in computer science. And, uh, yeah.

And then during this entire year I've been coding, playing with computers, playing with electronics. I'm still big fan of hardware, generally speaking, um, like low level electronics. And, um, yeah, that's how it, that's how it went.

I think that's really cool. Yeah. Um, what's your opinion on like education and speaking?

Yeah, so I'm a developer advocate now since almost two years. And before that I've done, I've done, like public speaking, I've delivered contents in various forms, podcasts, you know, videos, whatever. And I fundamentally believe that a developer advocate is a part-time educator because deliver a big part of delivering contents, even if it's technical contents, is you have to wrap it in a story.

Um, and to be able to build a story and build the content for that story and make the content make sense and make it clear and be articulate, you have to have a, not like a sort of an education, uh, approach to it. Not in the academia sense. I'm not talking about like standing in front of an auditorium.

I'm talking for four hours. But you still have to have the, the same approach, the same, um, way of structuring your content, structuring your, your, your, um, your talk, uh, making sure that you are hitting on all the basics so you don't like lose the audience. And, um, I, myself had, um, uh, had a job as a part-time teacher, um, in one of the schools I've been to.

Um, so I was both a student and a teacher, and I was teaching like programming. So I taught c plus plus, I thought, um, algorithms, uh, for six months. I did not like it that much.

Uh, and I think mostly because as an educator, it already make that much money, which is kind of sad. But, um, I think that that's gonna help me, um, learn the skill of how do you, do you teach people stuff, right? And I think that that's quite important if you are gonna be in a situation or in a position where you're addressing a public and you are like, you know, broadcasting some content to them, whether it's like physical through like conferences or even online where you are doing stuff, um, on a, on um, on a, on, you know, on videos or, or podcasts.

So I still, today, when I am shooting YouTube videos, I would still go and structure my contents in a storyline and write the points that I want to hit and make sure I hit all of them. I might not, I don't always script my talks. I very rarely script my talks.

Uh, videos is a different story 'cause you kinda have to script them, especially if you have like, have a fixed amount of time that you have to like, do this video. And, and, um, so, so yeah. So I think that like, having, having some sort of experience of being an educator is important.

If you're gonna educate developers on technical concepts, basically. What kind of videos do you show? We, so we have our own YouTube channel on, uh, on, uh, on Go Crowd Tech it's called.

And we do mostly videos about like, lot of short videos, like 10 minutes, about, um, usually it's about one specific feature of one specific product. So we would just like go, oh, here is, here is how to use this product to achieve this particular use case, or here is how to do this particular thing in this particular products. Right?

Uh, and then the longer format we do are usually a podcast. So I co-host a podcast called Kubernetes Podcast by Google. And in that podcast we do 30, 30 to 45 minutes interviews where we talk with people.

And that's slightly different formats because it's more like free flowing conversation, but you also have to be, um, again, the, like the, the education part of it is that you have to be able to improvise because we don't want our podcast to be scripted. 'cause then it'll feel kind of mechanic or robotic. Um, but we still want to be able to like ask follow up questions and you know, like kind of like work with the material you're receiving from me guests to like drive the conversations.

And that's also, I think is part of what educators do. So, Yeah. That's interesting.

Um, what, how's your involvement with the Moroccan communities? Oh, so I'm involved with, um, I mean I've been part of the community for a very long time, although I live abroad. Um, the biggest community I'm involved in is called Geeks, blah, blah.

Um, so it's a community that's was started by Mohammed Abule. Uh, and um, so it was an online community. It ca it came from, uh, a previously existing community that used to be called Facebook Developer Circles, which doesn't exist anymore.

And then they kind of like, um, uh, uh, rebranded it to Geeks, blah, blah. So Geeks blah blah is an online community. They do an online conference every year called Blah Black Con.

And it's essentially, um, it's a hundred percent Moroccan dialect. So pretty much most of the content is in Moroccan dialect. Um, so I help them, I am on their live stream sometimes I do talk at their conference.

I help them, um, find guests, find interesting people to talk to. Um, they have actually a very, in, they have a series which I was on a very long time ago called Moroccan Success Stories, which is essentially stories of Moroccans that like made a career for themselves. And because I travel a lot and I meet a lot of people, which are, I try to like find people all over the place to be guests on that, on that, um, on that, uh, series.

Uh, but yeah, generally speaking, just like participate, try to help be as helpful, as helpful as possible. Do you think that like, uh, having the learning software through the rock and dialect helpsss bridge the gap between like language and coding? I do believe so.

So I like for the background story, but Morocco used to be colonized by France. So we, that's why we speak French in this country, right? And when I did my studies, I did most of my studies in French and I also worked in a company where the main speaking spoken language was French, right?

Uh, I am an office in more and more, the, the, the, the upcoming new community is kind of more leaning toward English generally speaking. But I think that's like, if, if, if you are trying to approach the people who are already in the computer science space, um, then using English is fine, but the community is also trying to approach those who are not there yet, those who are like thinking about it. And for that, I think speaking a language that they understand is important.

Um, um, I mean the, the funny thing is, is even if the content itself isn't, isn't Moroccan dialect, the technical terms of saying English? 'cause you cannot like always translate them, but at least like explaining stuff in a language which is easily understandable by everyone, I think is important in bridging the gap between the tech world and those who have no idea what the tech world is. They just hear words like developer DevOps cloud, and they want to understand what this, what these are.

And do you think there's a lot of, uh, job opportunities for software development in Rocco? Yes, we have. Um, we, I mean that's how I started my career, right?

We have, we have quite a lot of people doing computer science or development, generally speaking. Um, a long time ago it used to be mostly consulting companies, so companies that are French or American, that, that like opened their offices here, hire local talents, and then they would work on projects abroad is either in France or in, uh, the US or in, you know, French speaking Canada or something like that. But, uh, over time even big tech companies now are implementing themselves in Morocco.

So we have a huge Oracle office here in Morocco, in Casablanca, we have IBM, we have Microsoft, um, we have even AWS actually they have an office here, or they rather, they acquired the company that had an office in Morocco. So now it's not that company anymore, it's IBM. The company originally is French, but they had an a satellite office in Morocco.

So when they acquired them, they all become part of AWS they have. Um, uh, and then you have a lot of other smaller companies that are actually products companies, so making tech products and then still quite a lot of, um, of like, um, uh, um, consulting. Um, a huge part of the tech team is in Morocco.

Um, reacts is huge here. Next GS is quite big. Angular as well.

Um, c sharp, lot of Java, um, a lot of, uh, Azure, um, Azure Cloud and AWS Cloud. Um, so yeah, quite, quite a lot of opportunities. Do You like the texting has been growing over the years?

Definitely, yes, I think so because we have a lot of schools teaching engineers teaching computer science. So I think that, that the scene have been growing tremendously and now we ha we even have like a ministry of digital transformation, uh, that is, that is tasked with moving the country toward, like being more online and, and moving away from paperwork. I think that's cool.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, we'll, we'll we'll see.

It's, it's moving in the right direction. It's moving slowly to my taste, but it's moving in the right direction. And for the education part, with like computer science here, is it mainly universities which have it?

Or do you know if they're teaching lower level kids? Any technology? So that's a very interesting question.

Um, used to be mostly universities and used to be that in order to go to computer science, you have to follow the traditional, uh, you know, the traditional like high school degree, bachelor degree, master's degree, et cetera. Um, in parallel, there was the school where I went, which is this trade school, I talked about this associate degree, right? But recently we have, um, uh, we, we had, uh, a school opening up called 1337.

So le that's such a nerdy, nerdy name. And um, it's the ki it's the basically an a peer learning school. It's a concept that exists in France called 42.

Um, again, another nerdy, nerdy name. Um, um, which essentially the way it works is that they, they get people in without, like if you, if you want to sign up, you don't have to have, uh, any education background. You don't have to even have, I think a high school degree.

You sign up to the school, they do like a pre-selection, they do like an intensive bootcamp for I think few weeks. And then they select the people who they think they have potential. The program lasts two to three years.

And during these two to three years, you are on a peer learning, uh, uh, uh, uh, peer learning program. So there is no formal teachers, there are no classes. You have like a, a roadmap that you have to follow to learn.

And at the end of each step at that roadmap, there is a project and you have to finish the project and get your projects peer reviewed by your peers. So it's just people teaching each other. So it's not really, it's not like a typical bootcamp as in North American bootcamp where you have like a six months and you become a full stack developer.

But this is a bootcamp in the sense that it's kind of the same setup except that there is no teachers, there is no like classes, it's like just people helping each other learn. I think that's a good way to do it and it gets a lot of people opportunity to become software developers. Yeah, definitely.

And I think it's also gives people opportunity to do it in a shorter time. 'cause if you want to do the traditional path, it would take you typically five years. So like I had to do a bachelor and a master's and um, so this is a great way to do, to like shortcut that and, and, and get to get to the field very quickly.

And there are actually people that doesn't even finish the whole three years that are people that would find jobs at the end of one year or two years. 'cause like if you are, I think if you are like very curious and you want to learn, um, you can like speed through the roadmap and either finish it early or, or get, get enough knowledge to be able to get a job. That's really cool.

Now you can kind of speed through it. Yeah, exactly. I think I learned a lot about like the software industry in Morocco today.

Nice. So thank you Abda. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm happy. I'm glad you did.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.