[Music]hey everybody welcome to another edition

of pocommunity

I’m Mike Arboit and I’m sitting here

with Amr the internet guy

hey guys how’s it going how’s it going

man well good thank you mike

yeah so tell us a little bit about

yourself your story and everything

oh like okay you have all day yeah

so the first thing is if you realize my

name is only three letters it’s just amr

which is very hard to pronounce usually

so i ended up having nicknames

so my first nickname was amor and then

this like gave me some kind of a

reputation because it’s like love in

in Latin languages and i didn’t want to

be known as the love guy

why not I’m married already taken

sorry guys

but um when i started to work

one of the things that caught up my

attention so

if we go back to like to my first

windows computer

so like any like any kid in the old days

you’d learn a little bit of programming

you your parents would buy you like

whatever

computer was available at the moment and

at these times

nothing compared to what we have these

days it was like an Amstrad or a

Sinclair or whatever like something

black small with a very small screen

that that’s

like kind of gray and black you know

and the text wasn’t even good contrast

like it was

i think yellow or something on the

screen

and if you switch it off it doesn’t see

if there was no hard disk

but you you kind of like play around

with it try to create the game try to

program bits and pieces and like learn a

little bit

and then i went to university i took

some programming courses of languages

that are no longer in use like Cobol and

Fortran

and i left it after this i just went

worked you know i worked in sales and

marketing

then i joined one of the airlines and i

was actually a cabin crew

like an air host and

during my time in the airline I

started I wanted to learn more

not only about technology but like i was

always thinking so when i joined the

airline i was

1994 i was what 23 yeah i was 23.

so the first two years of course I’m

traveling I’m seeing the world I’m

having a lot of fun

but after two three years you start

thinking okay what’s next

am i gonna stay in this job for the rest

of my life and retire

which is not a bad thing like it’s a

good job you get good money

you meet nice people you see the world

but the hardest thing is you can’t have

like a regular stable relationship

and you know let alone have kids and

build a family

um i don’t know my colleagues are still

doing it like

you know kudos to everybody and to all

of you guys like i couldn’t do what

you’re doing

yeah so i started to learn different

bits and pieces and um

the first thing is i became a trainer so

within the airline itself i took a few

courses and i became one of the trainer

i didn’t do an awful lot of courses you

know for some reasons and flying

schedules and stuff

I’ve done a few but i was always

thinking about what’s next

so 1996 i think i got my windows 95

computer with

one of these modems and it was my first

experience with the internet

and i didn’t know anything like i didn’t

know how to shut off

the computer i just go and unplug it

but the most fascinating part for me was

things like email like i couldn’t

believe that you can

type a message and it arrives after a

few seconds and like

I’m like what and there’s no paper no

I’m guys I’m

I’m a fax guy and a rotary phone guy

like that’s the

yeah so i took it up on myself to just

like

how does this i wanted to know how this

works so i looked around

for courses for anything and you gotta

remember

1996 the internet was slow we didn’t

have the dot-com boom

or bubble yet and there were no courses

the only it courses that were like

fashionable back then was the microsoft

engineer certification and

i kept on on and off like looking at it

and it was hard because if you wanted to

learn

there was nothing online like these days

and I’m flying so i don’t

i have no control over my schedule so i

can’t go to a university

or a specific institute and have like

you know like five days a week forty

whatever 40 hours per week and then

do it on four weeks and get my

certification

was very hard so i started to play

around

you know break my computer and go give

it to the

you know where i bought it from for the

guys to fix it

and then i would just stick around and

try to learn

what they’re doing and then the next

time i break it i try it myself if it

works

good if it doesn’t did the same thing

with the internet started to read on the

internet like

you know at the time how things work and

you know there was a

i remember i think it was

uh i can’t remember which side it was

but it was one of the most basic sides

that’s like Wikipedia now like at the

time there was no Wikipedia

and i think it was uh

I don’t know maybe ISOC which is the

internet society like the main one of

the main bodies

of you know I wouldn’t call them the

regulators of the internet but one of

the main bodies that’s

in charge of making the internet better

yeah

and i went there and then it all came to

action in

i think 2000 i found a good course so

finally i found like a great course that

teaches you how to be a webmaster

and the course itself had different

modules uh one of them which was the

hardest one was networking

so for you to understand how computers

communicate

uh with each other and for everyone to

understand that the internet as we call

it

the internet is just a massive network

and so many machines are communicating

with each other so

i needed to learn that infrastructure to

understand

how my email can reach somewhere without

a paper in a few seconds

and then the next module was

uh the languages that are used

on the internet and of course like the

most famous one is html language

which web designers used to write in

order to create a website

and the idea was really basic at the

time and

you know is you want that page to look

exactly the same

no matter where it’s open on which

computer on which browser and which

like at the time of course we didn’t

have mobile devices and smartphones and

stuff

but before the internet

if you’ve written a document in anything

let’s say microsoft word

and you send it to somebody if they

don’t have the same version that you’re

using they wouldn’t see it

exactly as you intended and that was the

whole idea

of html as a language it was like you

wanted to look exactly the same

everywhere and that’s why nowadays

websites

you know if you’re in japan you’ll see

exactly the same thing that you’ll see

if you’re Australia or here in Canada or

whatever and i learned that like bit by

bit

to like you know to the point that like

everything there was to know about

html everything there was to know about

some of the other coding

languages that that existed at the time

like JavaScript and

some others and then the last module was

the

most fun was about e-commerce and

you gotta realize this was what uh

19 no sorry that there was 2001 2000

2001

just when the dot-com bubble burst

and everybody wanted to be Jeff Bezos

and Amazon

but nobody understood how it works and

actually our study case was Amazon

at the time little did we know that it’s

gonna be

you know the biggest retailer on earth

and Jeff Bezos would be the richest man

and

take over bill gates and the queen yeah

but yeah that was like people were

making fun of him at the time because he

wasn’t making profit

yeah you know 2000 2001 2002 that people

thought Jeff buses was crazy because

he’s not making any profit

but what he was saying he said I’m

making money I’m just not

taking it as profit I’m reinvesting it

into Amazon

and that was like pretty much like

by the time i finished when i got my

certification

uh I was hired by one of the

institutes of technology as

as an e-commerce consultant i used to

train like CEOs

of companies at the time like companies

didn’t have anything online they

they didn’t have a website let alone an

e-commerce you know storefront

so that come to an institute of

technology or a university

to try and find who’s working on that

and then hire you by the hour

from the institute to just work with

them as a consultant and get things

up and running

and this was the start like you know

they couldn’t pronounce my name so they

called me the internet guy like

we’re meeting with the internet guy like

okay fine my name is Amr by the way

hey, it worked out it’s a good trade it’s

like a good title to have though like

it sticks out, right?