A Talk with Sajid Mehmood of Foursquare at #4SQHackPH

One of the coolest things about our Foursquare Hack Day Philippines event was having an actual guy from Foursquare around, taking developers through the paces of the Foursquare “Connected Apps” Platform. Sure, you could go online to read up on it, but nothing beats an explanation in the flesh.

The “Foursquare Guy” for the occasion was Sajid Mehmood, a software engineer on Foursquare’s platform team. Just the right guy to explain to developers how to use an API to write an app that connects to their platform.

Foursquare is based in Manhattan, so Sajid flew all the way from New York City to hang out with us. We checked out his resume – and yes, he does have a pretty impressive background and developer chops:

Sajid Mehmood is a Software Engineer at Foursquare, focusing on the Foursquare Platform used by over 25,000 developers worldwide.

Prior to joining Foursquare, Sajid was an engineer at Google New York, working on scaling Google’s global datacenter-to-datacenter network. He has previously held positions at Microsoft, Infragistics, and Princeton University, where he conducted research in web security, graph visualization, and location privacy.

Sajid graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor’s of Science and Engineering in Computer Science.

But over all, Sajid turned out to be a really cool guy, very open and willing to share tech talk freely with developers. Apart from giving the opening talk about the Foursquare API, he also did additional duties as a mentor during the hack, and was also one of the judges who selected the top three apps presented.

Ken Daganio (a.k.a. @superken) who was at the hack as Webgeek’s evangelist and emcee for the event, spent some time to talk to Sajid about what he thought of the proceedings of the day: