I've been a developer since before I knew it was a job. As a kid I took things apart, tweaked them, and rebuilt my own versions to see how they worked. The computer just gave that habit an endless surface. I taught myself, starting around 2005, the way a lot of people my age did: editing forum templates, breaking things, fixing them, building small tools for small companies. I learned PHP by tweaking what already existed until I understood it.
There's a thread I only saw years later, looking back. Almost everything I've built does the same thing. A system for a school in Kuala Lumpur that turned messy spreadsheets of student marks 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 didn't plan that pattern. It just kept showing up.
I joined Salla in 2020, on a short assignment to prove out a cross-store product search. The proof of concept shipped, turned into a real marketplace feature, 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. Somewhere in there I stopped being someone who writes the code and became someone who shapes the conditions under which other people write it. Nobody hands you a manual for that. So I started taking notes, and the notes became this.
I still stay close to the code, on purpose. Not to take the keyboard from anyone, but because the depth is where my judgment comes from. I care about the unglamorous parts: clear ownership, honest retrospectives, documentation as a form of respect for whoever comes next. The exciting outage is usually a failure of something boring that nobody protected.
Understand it before you change it
A system, I learn by taking it apart and putting it back together. Teams I learn by watching closely and questioning what looks obvious. Surface answers don't hold. You have to get underneath.
Search before you build
Early on I nearly rebuilt something that had existed for decades, because I didn't look. Now I read the prior work first, then build the part that's actually missing. I still have to remind myself.
Make the invisible visible
The best work I've done turns someone's unseen effort into something findable. Certificates, search, recognition for a team. Documentation does it too. Visibility is a kind of respect.
The work outlasts the title
Roles and companies change. What you actually built, and what you taught the people around you, is what stays. I write under my own name for the same reason.
Most of what matters to me happens off the org chart. I'm a father, and watching my eldest take things apart with the same curiosity I had is its own kind of mirror. It has quietly changed how I think about time, patience, and building things you won't see finished.
I read far more than I publish, mostly long-form on systems, language, and how organizations actually behave. I write in two languages on purpose: English for the work, and Arabic for the things English can't quite reach for me, memory, family, and whatever I'm reading.
Get in touch
Always glad to talk shop, or trade notes.
Scaling pains, AI in the engineering lifecycle, open source, or a good argument about why nothing should ever be provably deleted. The inbox is open, and I read everything.