Meet our guest speaker, Firas Safa on the Mobile Stage at DevTalks 2023

Get to know more about Firas Safa - Senior iOS Engineer at TrueLayer, as he takes the Mobile Stage at DevTalks 2023 to unveil his groundbreaking creation, Espresso Martini - A Swift Mock Server. Get ready to discover how Espresso Martini simplifies the testing and mocking of APIs, empowering developers to create robust and efficient mobile apps. But, before that, let’s find out more about him.

Q: Can you introduce yourself in a few words? 

Born and raised in Lebanon, I moved to Italy when I had just turned 18 to pursue my engineering degrees. I love art as much as engineering and would've became a designer if I got to university 3-4 years later. 

Q: What was your IT journey like? 

I was majoring in electronics and telecommunication engineering and it's fair to say that I did not like it, not one bit. A few months before graduating I landed a job as a Software Engineer in a consulting company where I worked on my thesis and learned the basics of programming, in Java. Just 6 month after, I did a lateral move inside the company and started working with Xamarin on cross platform mobile development. I wasn't big on consultancy, and they rarely, if ever care about their clients or the quality of the code they write so 20 month in I quit and joined a startup where I was a full stack engineer working with Python and Django. I worked there for a year and finally landed my first iOS Engineering job at Bending Spoons. There I learned a lot about engineering and iOS and worked on several fitness applications. After that I moved to fintech where I worked at Nexi, Telepass and currently TrueLayer making it easier one way or another for people to pay and enjoy payment backed services on their iPhone. 

Q: What is the favourite part of your job? 

Flexibility, by far. Being a Software Engineer, gives you’re the ability (in the right company) to work anytime, anywhere. While it’s hard to find a 100% async and remote job, as you will always have to attend meetings (often useless), being a Software Engineer gives you the highest chance to organise your work as you see most fit so you don’t have to miss the important moments in your life beyond work. 

Q: How has the industry changed in the last 5 years? 

With the normalisation of remote work, and the birth of startups that facilitate remote hiring, it became easier than ever to get a job remotely making it easier to get a job that you can enjoy and work on a product you love. 

Q: If you had to sum up your career in one sentence, what would you say? 

Be loyal to your goals, not the company you work for. 

Q: What about your hobbies/passions outside your work? 

I am a big fan of the NBA (Lebron is far better than Jordan) and the NFL. And my biggest passion is probably stand up comedy. The goal is to make enough money to retire around 40-45 and just do stand up comedy. That is of course if the "woke" movement don't make it illegal to crack a joke. 

Q: If you could time-travel to any point in history with a piece of modern technology, where would you go and what would you bring? 

I would go back to the early 2000s with Gigabit internet speed. When I was young we had to deal with dial-up internet (if you do not know what that is, I envy you), and I feel like I wasted so much potential when I was younger growing up in Lebanon because it was extremely hard and expensive to get online and consume knowledge and try stuff out. 

Q: If you could switch careers with anyone for a day, who would it be and why? 

Drake, cause I would love to know what if feels like sleeping on a 400.000$ bed (yes, that is the correct amount of zeros) 

Q: Short overview about what you will talk about at DevTalks 2023? 

In my talk I will go over how we can use the same Swift principles we apply in iOS development to work with server-side Swift. We will go over how to build a real project that will allow us to run a mock server on our macbook and iPhone. 

Q: What is your message for our Romania IT community? 

Keep pushing forward and growing. Remember that every line of code you write, every application you develop, and every user you impact plays a role in shaping the future. Let's continue to innovate, create, and inspire. 

So, join the 10th anniversary of DevTalks Bucharest to meet him! If you haven’t got your ticket yet, grab it now here!