About
The longer version: Aleppo to Amsterdam, and what happened in between.
I build software, and the teams and systems around it. Fifteen years of it — which began on the product side in Dubai rather than in code, moving a business onto the internet and then getting people to actually use what we’d built.
Since then: architecture and developer tooling in Istanbul, research and development in Amsterdam, product work at Spotify and Booking.com, and two things of my own — Harf Labs and Unblock Syria.
None of it reduces to a language or a platform. The useful part has almost always been at the seam between the technical and the organizational: what to build, how it should be shaped, and why something that works in a demo comes apart inside a real company.
I write here in Arabic and English — about software and AI, digital transformation, scale, and occasionally about politics and calligraphy.
On the way from Aleppo, my hometown, to Amsterdam where I live now, I passed through Dubai, Cairo, LA, and Istanbul. A welcome consequence: I speak Arabic, English, Turkish, and Dutch, and I’m learning Spanish.
Away from work I’m learning Arabic calligraphy, playing the piano, and still looking for the best espresso in town.