When the Covid Lockdown hit early last year, life seemingly came to a standstill. In that period of calm, my husband and I vowed to express to each other 5 things we felt grateful for every morning before work. Little did I know, that soon after that quiet period and by the end of that year, we would find ourselves moving overseas to the UK from South Africa.
Since the pandemic began you would have read several articles on how our personal and work lives have changed and adapted as we’ve moved online. Instead of face-to-face interaction we have been accustomed to using collaboration tools such as Zoom, Slack and WebEx.
It’s been a while since a former British Lord Chancellor declared “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts”, striking a populist note in the lead up to the UK’s Brexit referendum. In Watching the English, an entertaining book recommended to me when I first immigrated to this country, anthropologist Kate Fox writes about the English having “vestigial traces of a ‘culture of amateurism’, involving an instinctive mistrust of professionalism”. Others have argued about the superiority of generalists in a highly specialised world.1
In a recent conversation with Fnality’s CEO, Rhom, he recommended that I should be kinder to myself. I’ve heard it before. In fact, I’ve been hearing this repeatedly since the early days of my career. I would normally do something nice, like a longer weekend, or taking a long bath. However, having investigated this concept recently, I realised that it is not just about doing something nice for yourself; it is about the way you treat yourself, and how you use your inner voice. If you are a person who often says “I am my own worst critic” or hears “don’t be too hard on yourself” the chances are that you may not be very good at being kind to yourself. Many of us are not aware of the unhelpful...
Four years ago, my Fnality (formally known as the ‘USC Project’) journey began. I walked into a little office by St Pauls Cathedral that looked like something between the Apple store (read slick and technologically advanced) and a beach hut (read rustic, laid back and the kind of place you wanted to hang out) and contained a handful of geniuses! I took a seat at my new desk and tried to take it all in; new job, new role, new colleagues, new industry, new city. It quickly dawned on me, I’m no longer living in Devon, working in uniform at a major trauma hospital. I’m now working for a super cool technology research and development company in the heart of London, focused on making significant...
Sherif Elkhouly shares how Fnality embraced his uniqueness and created an opportunity for him that broke all moulds!
Who am I?
This must be an important question for anyone who is reading this article, right? I am a Consultant Engineer & have worked with organisations of different scales and domains like E-Commerce, Media and recently FinTechs. As a consultant, we move around between different clients and each time we are reborn with some fond and not so fond memories of our experience. Hence you are reading an article from a five-month-old toddler reborn as a Platform Engineer consultant in Fnality.
