--- title: About me so far... date: 2016-12-02T16:45:01.889Z edited: 2019-06-21T11:29:01.889Z author: Ismail Ghallou (Smakosh) canonical: https://smakosh.com/blog/about-me-so-far reading_time: 3 min (705 words) Tags: career, web-development --- # About me so far... ## The story of my nickname "Smakosh" I’m Ismail Ghallou also known as Smakosh, a nickname which was given to me since I was 8 years old by one of my childhood friends' father. Many teachers told their colleagues, my parents and sometimes me personally, that I was a good student during primary school, that was achieved by playing a lot of offline video games that really taught me probel solving like how to figure out the way out in Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed & the Tomb Raider trilogies etc... ## Primary school I was a typical nerd since primary school, wearing socks and sandals, everyone used to laugh at me but I never noticed that or felt different from the others, I also never brought any food with me to eat during the break while almost everyone else did so, I did get bullied but I used to always win the fights. ## Mid school At the last year of primary school I decided to move out to a public school rather than a private one, and during that time I got heavily addicted to Basketball, especially in the streets (AND1), I liked to instantly try out the tricks I learned from YouTube. Here’s a picture of some medals I got by winning few tournaments I & my friends both on Football & Basketball. ![medals](/assets/blog/medals.jpeg 'Follow me on Instagram to see more : https://www.instagram.com/smakosh19') During middle school, I started exploring more activities like drawing, graffiti, biking, skateboarding & watching Anime while I was still getting good marks even though my daily schedule was heavy with those activities, during high school I got addicted to Parkour & Free running and it was really a good experience “not to be able to do a backflip and then after a long period of training to actually do it without any excuses like not having gyms in your small city” it was something really amazing, I spent like 2 years practicing and have recorded some videos that you can watch and enjoy [right here](https://www.instagram.com/smakosh19).
## Gaming During the last year of high school I got a gaming PC that my dad bought for me since I've been bugging him since mid school, unfortunately it made me get addicted to gaming and as a result I graduated from high school with a bad mark. At that time, even the "lowest" nearby university didn't accept me to get in, I actually enrolled in a private school to stay up to date with the lessons so that I can retry passing the final test hoping that I'll get a better mark. ## Restart Fortunately after just 3 days of attending that private school, I actually got accepted in some sort of school which is equivalent to university & at that moment everything has changed, I started educating myself at home, learning, practicing by doing side projects & working as a free lancer from November 2015 until early 2017 when I got a job as a front-end developer at [Obytes](https://obytes.com/?ref=smakosh), working remotely without a degree and with the knowledge I taught myself at home as it has nothing in common with what I had learned at school, luckily I was always digging more knowledge and skipping sleep while stuying like that 2 years after high school. I still remember most of the teachers laughing at me when ever I publicly stated that you can get a job without a degree as a developer, turns out that I was right and I managed to influence two of my class mates who dropped out as well from university to work full time with a high paying job as software engineers. > Oh yeah, university welcomed me for the bachelor in software engineering which I never bothered to care about and I was writing JavaScript during a Java test which was funny as they didn't recognize JavaScript at all To be continued... you can view all my works on my website & more down bellow: - Behance: - GitHub: - Instagram: - Twitter: - Facebook: (I'm not on Facebook anymore) - YouTube: - Dribbble: - LinkedIn: - Codepen: And if you want to support me on Patreon, That would be really helpful :D --- _Originally published at https://smakosh.com/blog/about-me-so-far_