---
title: "About — Salah Al-Nawah"
canonical: https://salahmyn.me/about/
lang: en
---

# About — Salah Al-Nawah

> VP of Engineering at Salla. A builder who learns systems from the inside, and writes down what he finds.

I'm driven by curiosity. I want to know how things really work, the code and the people both. By day I lead engineering at Salla. This is where I write down what the work teaches me, while it's still fresh enough to be honest about.

- Email: hi@salahmyn.me
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salahmyn

## The longer version

I've been a builder since before I knew it was a job. As a kid I took things apart and rebuilt my own versions to see how they worked; the computer just gave that habit an endless surface. I taught myself from around 2005, editing forum templates, breaking things and fixing them, learning PHP by tweaking what already existed until I understood it.

There's a thread I only saw later: almost everything I've built does the same thing. A system that turned a Kuala Lumpur school's messy mark spreadsheets into certificates. Booking platforms for travel agencies. An education portal to help students find universities. Search that makes 80,000+ merchants' products findable. Each one takes someone's invisible effort and makes it something the world can see.

I joined Salla in 2020 on a short assignment to prove out cross-store product search. The proof of concept shipped and I stayed. Six years later the engineering org is past 170 people across 30+ squads, building commerce software that 80,000+ merchants run their businesses on. I still stay close to the code, on purpose, because the depth is where my judgment comes from.

## How I think about the work

1. Understand it before you change it.
2. Search before you build.
3. Make the invisible visible.
4. The work outlasts the title.

## Get in touch

Scaling pains, AI in the engineering lifecycle, open source. The inbox is open: hi@salahmyn.me