A little bit to introduce myself. My name is George Azzam, I graduated in June 2009 as an Electrical and Computer Engineer from the American University of Beirut. I currently develop my own mobile apps and games. You can see my work on my publisher's website: Dgiapps. However, my journey as a developer started when I was 13.
At first, I started with a Game Editor and made my first game. After that, I dove into the world of C++. I started reading and doing some random utility programs for personal use. As I used to play some Online Games, I ended up doing some utilities for Utopia, a browser based massive multiplayer internet-based strategy game to help me and my teammates.
I believe it's important to mention Utopia, since I played it for a relatively long period of time and it taught me some valuable skills. To be good in anything, you have to be dedicated to it, that is one thing I found in Utopia, it needed a lot of dedication. Another important skill I put to use is teamwork, seeing as you are part of a group (Kingdom) of at max 25 players, you have to work as a team to reach the top. The monarch gets elected by the players, from the skills that I learned, it seemed that I was a good candidate for monarchy, and therefore was elected to become the King of the Kingdom. With that, came a lot of responsibility, I had to manage the internal affairs of my Kingdom as well as arrange Mutual-Assistance Pacts (MAP) and Non-Aggression Pacts (NAP) and Wars between our Kingdom and other Kingdoms/Clans. Doing that, I acquired diplomatic and leadership skills and our Kingdom reached the top 10 among thousands. I also developed some utilities with C++ and JavaScript (depending on the need) and shared it with whoever was interested.
The more I got into coding, the more I wanted to see what else is out there, so I looked at other languages (VB/Java/C#) and implemented some random applications with them. In university, I developed some games as projects for my Computer Graphics course, they were done in C++ and OpenGL and can be found in the Games section. I really enjoyed working on these projects since game development is a field I'm very interested in. I also worked with Java, as part of the Computer Networks course, and we worked on Chat-App which is a chatting application loosely based on how Internet Relay Chat works. I prefer coding using C and C++, after working a bit with the above mentioned languages, for desktop applications. And since I was introduced to Qt and started working with it, I feel so much better knowing that I can run C++ Graphical User Interface code on the most popular Operating Systems (Linux, Mac and Windows).