Mohsin Shafique

Mohsin Shafique Hijazee started his programming adventure by teaching himself C, and later C++, mostly with the Win 32 API and MFC. Later, he worked with Visual Basic to develop an invoicing application for local distributors. In the meantime, .NET came along and Mohsin happened to be working with C# and Windows Forms. All of this was around desktop applications, and all of this happened during his days at university. Very few people have had a chance to work with fonts, and that's exactly what Mohsin happened to do as his first job—developing OpenType fonts for complex right to left calligraphic styles such as Nastaleeq. He developed two different fonts, one based on characters and joining rules, and the other one contained more than 18,000 ligatures both of which are in public domain. His first serious interaction with web development started with Ruby on Rails. Shortly after that, he discovered Google App Engine and found it to be a very interesting platform despite its initial limitations back in 2008, with Python being the only available runtime environment. Mohsin kept experimenting with the platform and deployed many production applications and mobile backends that are hosted on Google App Engine to this day. Currently, Mohsin is working as a backend software engineer with a large multinational Internet company that operates in the online classified space in dozens of countries across the globe.