// About
A long apprenticeship in production.
Senior Software Engineer. Backend systems, APIs, and the operational work around them - plus the earlier years of teaching and commercial web work.
me@t4mer.net
I am Tamer W. AbuGhali. More than a decade building web applications and backend systems, mostly close to production: APIs, databases, queues, deployments, and the quiet work of keeping a system understandable after the original excitement has worn off.
I am Palestinian. I studied Information Technology at the Islamic University of Gaza. The current work is backend engineering - Laravel, PHP, MySQL, AWS, Redis, Docker, Linux, APIs, and CI/CD - but that list is a map of where I have spent time. It is not a personality, and it is not the whole story.
What I actually care about is how systems behave once they leave the laptop. Caching that looked clever until traffic arrived. A job that succeeded in staging and failed in a way nobody had a dashboard for. An integration that worked in Postman and then spent an afternoon refusing to work from the application.
I am interested in understanding software beyond frameworks. Recently that includes AI systems, vector databases, C++, Qt, and cross-platform application development. I am learning these in public. Desktop work is not entirely foreign - I used to teach C# Windows Forms - but Qt is still a learning series, not a seniority claim.
Technologies change. Learning how systems work lasts much longer.
Current and finished systems are on the projects page. A printable version of this résumé is here. If you want to know what I am doing this month: /now. Work contact: me@t4mer.net.
// 01 experience
Selected roles, then earlier history.
Product work is listed without employment dates. The chronology below that is earlier career - teaching, agency, and commercial web work.
Senior Software Engineer
Numero eSIM
Backend engineering on a large eSIM platform: APIs, provider integrations, payments, reporting, and the operational systems around a live telecom product.
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- Worked on backend architecture for provisioning and account flows, where a failed job is not an abstract error - it is a customer who cannot connect.
- Integrated with eSIM and telecom providers, payments, notifications, and internal administration tools.
- Spent time on the unglamorous production work: background jobs, reporting, retries, and making failure visible.
Senior Software Engineer
Navitas Safety
Backend and product engineering across compliance, digital food safety, and academy systems - Laravel, MySQL/Aurora, Redis, AWS, and the CI/CD around them.
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- Worked across Navitas Compliance, Digital Food Safety, and Navitas Academy rather than a single isolated service.
- Built and maintained production Laravel applications on MySQL/Aurora, Redis, AWS, Docker, and Linux.
- Debugged real production behaviour: queue backlogs, cache mistakes, deployment issues, and the occasional bug that only appears after a long stretch of data.
Earlier
Software Engineer
Web & product engineering
c. 2014
Commercial web work for large organisations, including projects connected to Toyota Middle East and Abdul Latif Jameel - learning how client work, production, and deadlines actually interact.
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- Built and maintained public-facing sites and internal tools, where the interesting problem was rarely the framework and usually the integration, the data, or the release.
- This is where the habits formed: read the logs, distrust the happy path, and leave the next person a system they can operate.
Senior Web Developer and Team Leader
Digital Cloud
2013 - 2014
Senior web development and team leadership at Digital Cloud. I am keeping the public version to the role and the years - those were client environments.
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- Led and shipped web work in a commercial agency setting, including the coordination that comes with being the person other developers wait on.
- This is also the period that later connected to larger client sites, including work associated with Toyota Middle East and Abdul Latif Jameel.
Web Development Trainer
Coders For ICT
2010 - 2014
Taught software development and information security - PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, jQuery, and related courses - including work with the Computer Programmers Society.
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- Ran courses and workshops for several years: more than thirty courses, and a few hundred students, across web development and security.
- Teaching forced a habit that still shows up in how I write: if I cannot explain why something failed, I do not understand it yet.
Software Developer
Xteam
2009 - 2010
The first professional software role on the record. I will not invent a product list I no longer have; the useful fact is that this is where the career started.
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- Wrote software in a small-team environment before the later agency, training, and product years.
// 02 education
MCPD - Microsoft Certified Professional Developer
Vision Plus, Gaza · 2010
B.A. - Bachelor of Information Technology
Islamic University of Gaza · 2007
// teaching
I spent several years teaching what I was also still practising: PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, jQuery, C# Windows Forms, Java, and information security. Training is one of the things I actually enjoyed. Explaining a bug to a room is a ruthless test of whether you understand it.
Coders For ICT · Computer Programmers Society
PHP Web Development
2010 - 2014
Full web applications in PHP, from the years when PHP 5.3 was the current story.
Front-end Web Development
2010 - 2014
HTML, CSS, and jQuery - the practical frontend of that period.
MySQL
2010 - 2014
Schema, queries, and why the database is usually the real application.
Windows Forms Development in C#
2012 - 2014
Desktop applications, which is part of why Qt later felt like a return rather than a random hobby.
Rapid Java Development
2010 - 2014
Writing, compiling, GUIs, and talking to a relational database with JDBC.
Introduction to Security
2010 - 2011
Practical IT security for machines, applications, and networks - not theatre.
Social Engineering
2012 - 2013
How attacks actually work on people, and how to recognise the tactics.
Earlier in my career I also wrote a book, Introduction to Information Security. A book I wrote earlier in my career. I am listing the title because it is part of the public record, not because I am still introducing myself as an author first.
// from the archives
A few public markers from earlier years. They are here for completeness, not as a highlight reel.
Information Security and Protection from Piracy Academic Day
May 2013 - Spoke at an academic day organised by the University College of Science and Technology, and received a shield of honour for it.
Startup Weekend Gaza
October 2012 - First place with my team at a Startup Weekend organised with Google and Mercy Corps.
IT OpenDay 2
March 2012 - First place at a competition held among Gaza universities.
// 03 technical expertise
Organised by the work, not by a score.
No percentage bars. The first groups are tools I have used in production. The last group is currently being learned, and is labelled that way on purpose.
Backend
- PHP
- Laravel
- Lumen
- REST APIs
- Microservices
- Background Jobs
- Queues
Data
- MySQL
- Amazon Aurora
- Redis
Infrastructure
- AWS
- Docker
- Linux
- Nginx
- Apache
- PHP-FPM
CI/CD
- Jenkins
- GitHub Actions
- Git
Frontend
- JavaScript
- Vue.js
- jQuery
Earlier in my career
Tools from earlier roles and from teaching. Not a claim that I use them as my daily stack now.
- CodeIgniter
- C#
- Java
- SQL Server
- Oracle
- MS Access
Currently Exploring
I am learning these. I am not claiming production expertise.
// not_production_claims
- Vector Databases
- AI Engineering
- C++
- Qt
- Desktop Applications