Youssef Tawfik Podcast Transcript
Youssef Tawfik joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Youssef Tawfik. Youssef Tawfik is a software engineer from Cairo, Egypt, with a bachelor’s degree from Coventry University. Yousef has experience working as a software engineer in Dell Technologies and has helped the middleware team in SRE transformation.
He helped with automating the operational work in the middleware team. Yousef’s expertise is mostly in web application development. Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Freelancing was a big part of his experience where he was commissioned to build software. He is also the Co-Founder of Revi Digital Agency, a place where both technical and creative sides of processes intertwine.
With a team of professional software engineers and professional graphic designers, they are able to provide all the services that a business might need.
Well, good afternoon. Youssef, welcome to the show.
[00:01:04] Youssef Tawfik: Appreciate it, Brian. Good afternoon to you.
[00:01:06] Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you for making the time. I know sometimes we have to traverse time zones globally. I love getting up every day and meeting somebody new, especially on a podcast internationally.
And I know that you’re hailing out of the great country of Egypt. So, I appreciate the time that you made today.
[00:01:23] Youssef Tawfik: Yeah. Thank you for having me. Honestly. It’s a great pleasure to be on the podcast and yeah. Egypt.
[00:01:29] Brian Thomas: Love it. Love that. That’s so exciting for me. You’ve made my day today.
So, jumping into the questions here, Youssef, you’ve got quite the career in technology as a software engineer, freelancer and entrepreneur. Now you’re the Co-Founder of Revi Digital Agency. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:50] Youssef Tawfik: For me the secret to the career growth is learning something new every day.
It’s it’s pretty important because tech changes, I would say weekly, the new features, the new stuff that is going UI UX trends, everything is changing rapidly, so you’d have to be in a constant state of learning and, always on the go, always updated with the newest technology. And because it affects products and real-life software products.
So, you need to be all over the place there. And for what does inspire me, honestly, what keeps me going right now is to retire well, I guess that’s, I think that’s something we all aim for, but definitely also giving back to my community here.
[00:02:32] Brian Thomas: Thank you for sharing that and the last point you made there on retiring.
Well, you’re absolutely right. My grandfather said that it doesn’t take age to retire. It takes money. So, you’re absolutely right on that. Youssef, what has been the most challenging thing that you’ve had to overcome with your digital agency thus far?
[00:02:51] Youssef Tawfik: I guess for me; it was taking the engineer’s hat off and put it on the entrepreneur. So as an entrepreneur and know that everyone here can relate we have the head of the sales. We are the marketing, we are the accounting, we are basically everything. And we are still the engineer. So the way you think as an engineer, it’s not necessarily the same, the way you think as an entrepreneur.
So that was a challenging hurdle I had to overcome. But as I said before, learning every day doesn’t need all. To be technology only, of course, you’d need to learn how to talk, how to sell, how to market your products. You could have the best software in the whole wide world, and you cannot sell it.
So it’s really important to have those.
[00:03:33] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And you’re absolutely right. At the end of the day, it’s all about connections, relationships. A lot of it is sales, but having a diverse breadth of that skill set and experience certainly helps to make you successful and overcome some of those challenges.
So, thank you for sharing. Youssef, you are obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging technologies in your tech stack. You’re a techie like me. Is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
[00:03:59] Youssef Tawfik: I don’t want to say AI because AI is a buzzword right now, but I say an older buzzword, which is blockchain.
It’s from the past few years, but people can relate. Blockchain to crypto, but actually blockchain is a really secure technology, redundant technology to store data and make sure it’s not changed, so the use of blockchain in decentralized systems is something really important.
The technology itself is fascinating and people have slept on it. No one actually knows what blockchain is, but if you actually know what blockchain does, you’ll be using it instead of any relational database or normal database, honestly, if you have the money for sure.
[00:04:40] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that.
And our publication here is actually built on Web 3 as well. We duplicate our Web 2 content out to web three. And so, we’re proud of that. And we love the blockchain technology for sure. Youssef last question of the day. Could you share something from your career experience that would be helpful to those listening,
Looking to grow their career in tech or entrepreneurship.
Let’s start with tech. I feel in tech, as I said, learning, learning, learning, and actually do what you learn. So, you just don’t read a textbook or you just don’t read a documentation, but you actually go for building a product, building a software, building a project.
And as an entrepreneur, I would recommend do either. Free unpaid work or cheap work just to get your portfolio up just to get your experience up because I’m sure everyone knows that their work is worth a lot of money, but they need to build the reputation in the market. And that’s a lesson that I learned the hard way, yeah.
Build your portfolio up, especially as a techie, because we know that you’re too valuable, but the other people, non techies need to know that you are that valuable, and they will see that via your work only.
Thank you. And that’s some great advice. And I know that you’re I would say still pretty green in your tenure, in your career, in your entrepreneur journey, but that’s awesome that you’ve learned so much and be able to share with our global audience today.
Youssef, it was a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:06:10] Youssef Tawfik: Yeah. Appreciate it, Brian. Thank you for having me and thank you everyone.
[00:06:13] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Youssef Tawfik Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
