I am not an activist and I am not paranoid about others looking at my data trails before hiring me or starting a new business. …
Online identity – My Body is My Data

I am not an activist and I am not paranoid about others looking at my data trails before hiring me or starting a new business. …
There are four different, or should we say main, factors in life that you have to learn to master in order to maintain a healthy life style. Those factors are:
And the main idea is to balance. You are not required to give one of those factors more effort or time than the other to live a successfully healthy life.
But is it even possible? Especially in our chaotic and demanding industry!
Interact’s own Mina Shawky, Head of Service Delivery, is happy to point out some tips on how to balance those four important factors
In all the different IT companies you get around 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, to work, but is it always enough?
Being a Software Developer for 3 years and managing software projects for more than 5 I can tell you that the answer is, simply, No!
In project-ised environments, like ours, working 40 hours per week is usually not enough to get things done. People are always on their toes with deadlines, customer demands, demos, quality enhancements, features, phases, new technologies, research, investigation, POCs, topping competition, etc… and the list goes on. If you work in this industry, and you want to succeed, you have to give it all out.
You all agree, right? So how is it even possible to give enough time for growing and excelling in your career while maintaining a healthy life?
The answer is actually simpler than you can imagine. Just give those tips some thought and you might find them of value for you
Now for the second important factor you need to control, to balance your healthy life, and that’s family.
Ever gave this quote – that we used to learn for years and years since we were kids – a serious thought?
Stronger Body, Stronger Mind
العقل السليم في الجسم السليم
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else
Now for the hard question, how to do all this? Too many tips and not enough time!
Decide how you want to proceed with your life. You have to make your own choice on how to use your time. It’s all about changing your mindset and maintaining your goals. Can you wake up an hour earlier and hit the gym or go for a run? Can you focus on working smart during your 8 hours of work? Will you value the time you spend with friends and family?
Failing to make such decisions will result in being buried with tons of work, with no time to refresh, regroup, or have fun! And when its not fun, it’s not worth it.
Here at Interact we definitely value all those points and always seek to live healthy and have fun while doing our jobs.
Proudly crafting – and we enjoy doing so – in Egypt.
Once again, politics and technology happening come across on our Interact Egypt timeline. The date is Jan 28th 2014, which is a very important and stressful date in Egypt for two reason: The trail of former president Mohamed Morsi facing jailbreak charges and the second reason was the 3rd anniversary of revolution, namely that date on 2011 was called the “Friday of rage”.
But, the same date was stressful on another more interesting track than politics, technology! It was the announcement date for Google Cloud Developer Challenge 2013, an annual software applications contest based on Google app engine. The contest, that started on September 4th had many applications submitted from different parts around the world including India, Latin America, Middle East and North Africa, South East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and finally. United States, Europe and the Rest of the World. The contest had 5 milestone dates starting from competition start till winners announcement and was really a very useful experience for everyone who joined regardless where he/she reached. Behind the scenes, everybody also witnessed and was amazed by the energy of the enthusiastic young lady orchestrating the whole contest, Elizabeth Clark.
Middle East participation was, as usual, quit interesting to me. In the last 4 or 5 years, the tech startup ecosystem started to flourish and get unleashed in the Middle East in general, and Egypt in specific. For this reason also in the recent years Egypt saw lots of events, contests, hackathons for tech startups, from international entities including Google’s own “start with Google” (where our country manager Fady Ramzy presented an interesting session about E-Marketing Strategies for entrepreneurs) and the more interesting events like Startupweekend, that was courageous enough to move away from Cairo to other places all over Egypt including upper Egypt cities witnessing such events for their first time like Assuit and Aswan! This also ignited local scene here in Cairo to start running our own “local” entrepreneurship events like RiseUp summit last November.
Back to our #gcdc story, which is even more interesting, since Interact Egypt’s own geek Mohamed Abdel elRahman was one of the finalists with his cool application Courseit, which enables you to learn anything you want, you can find numerous of useful written courses and streaming videos that can optimize your knowledge and skills in many different life categories. Mohamed is a real example of Egypt’s new generation technology geeks, his personal hobbies is to play around with new Content Management Systems and programming languages, reading techies blogs, trying out new frameworks. On that day he was really nervous and curious to see his app as the winner for the Middle East region, and we all supported him and had the same passion 🙂 But then, the announcement was on that night, due to difference in timezones, which added more stress here!
Finally the announcement came out late night from the Middle East were Geo Sketch from Saudi Arabia and Travellog from UAE, but our Mohamed was even filled with further energy to proceed on the geeks track and jump into future contests again!
Interact would like to congratulate all the #GDCD winners worldwide and especially the uprising Middle East!