Behind the Blog: Rami Alaaeldin
What brought you to Omio?
At the time, I wanted to relocate to a new city. But the main reason I chose Omio was that I wanted to work with a product that has a large, established customer base, and I wanted to be part of an environment with rapid feedback, solving live issues — with all technical challenges and issues that come with that.
Did you have an interest in travel prior?
As a consumer, yeah I did. I’ve traveled a lot, going all the way back to my childhood. And I used to spend a lot of time thinking about different modes of transit, their pros and cons, how to expand networks they work from, how to enhance that network. This was especially because I spent four years driving bi-weekly, sometimes even weekly, 300km in each direction just because it was easier and more comfortable. That left me asking myself whether that should be the case.
That sounds a bit like the questions you tackled in your recent blog post; sort of thinking through how an overhead view might be leveraged to enhance or optimize the at-hand experience of a journey. Did that former routine contribute to how you thought about routing?
Not really, no. The story here is more about expanding the network, changing the route, adding new stations or making sure that primary stations are easily accessible via local transport from different parts of the city.
What were you working on before you joined?
I was moving between a lot of different projects in a small amount of time, sometimes working on two or three projects at once (which I don’t recommend). Some projects were related to IoT, some were related to water and electricity meters, others were about telecommunications. I was passionate about how to take in all these data and serve as many users as possible; how to specify your domain and build a maintainable and extendable application. In the process, I learned different types for communication, different designs, and that there’s no one solution that fits every situation.
What sorts of things did you want to have an impact on when you came on board?
I think I can say that I was hoping to help make the system more stable, eliminate errors, and enable it to provide any volume of users high-quality journeys.
Have you learned anything you didn’t expect to, in that process?
Oh, of course. Learning is important, but I wouldn’t say I didn’t expect it. That’s why I joined Omio in the first place. Even just in my last blog post, it was a process of learning that there’s no perfect solution; we have to challenge our assumptions every now and then, gather feedback quickly, and enhance our solutions as we get new data.
What’s most exciting to you in the tech landscape, at the moment?
That’s a difficult question to answer. I’m always excited about architecture topics; coding topics too. Debates about the best languages and new features never get old, either.
Interested in teaming up with Rami and joining the Omio team? There’s very likely a role for you. Check out our Jobs page!
