Elie Mouchrik

He attended American University of Beirut, Lebanon, majoring in computer science. At 24, he's a software engineer for Taglogic Offshore, a programming company.

I live with my parents about 20 miles outside of Beirut in a hill town called Shweir. Like the majority of Lebanese, I have faced violence. In 1989 our house was shelled. Nobody was injured, thank God. My family was sheltered on the first floor where we had sandbags piled around us.

I started to work for Taglogic when I was in university. After I finished my undergraduate degree, I came back and worked for them full-time. We started doing outsourcing for Lebanese clients, Arab countries, and the U.S. about two years ago. I thought it was brilliant that we could do work way across the world, and it's seamless. We could write the code, do the application, do conference calls with people in the U.S., deploy our code from here to their servers, and get everything up and running. We can now do business with any place in the world. It's a big, big edge for us.

For my career, I'd like to do more outsourcing and more application development. Then I'd like to move on to packaged software products that can be sold and distributed all over the world. I honestly believe we can have peace in Lebanon and I can have opportunities. Some instability might occur, as it has in the past. So I see the possibility of moving to another location temporarily, so we can do the work. But then I want to come back. I insist on staying in our country and doing this work.