Welcome to My Small Corner of the Wide Web

My professional journey began right after university when I joined Sweedy Portal in Dubai as a Backend Engineer. I was part of an ambitious project to build a comprehensive school management system from the ground up—a much-needed solution for schools across the GCC region at that time.

From the start, I played a key role in shaping the project’s technical direction. I selected Laravel and Vue.js as the core technology stack and provided guidance and support to my team members. As the lead on the backend, I architected the system using Clean Architecture and SOLID principles to ensure our code was both robust and easy to maintain. My responsibilities also included defining the data model, optimizing the database, and writing unit and integration tests to guarantee feature stability. This foundational experience concluded when I left to fulfill my mandatory military service.

After completing my military service, I joined Assistt, a U.S. startup building a mobile app for neighborhood odd-jobs. Following an interview with the CEO and CTO, I was hired as a Fullstack Engineer and quickly became deeply involved in the product’s development.

This role proved to be one of the most formative experiences of my career. Working closely with the CTO, Bryan Walsh, I contributed to key architectural decisions and best practices across the entire tech stack. My work spanned the backend (NestJS), the mobile app (Flutter), and the web admin portal (Angular). I also managed the build and deployment process for both Android and iOS. Bryan’s mentorship was invaluable, and his guidance played a significant part in shaping the engineer I am today.

Over the course of a year, we successfully built an MVP, participated in accelerators, and launched the app. When the initial product didn’t gain the expected traction, the founders decided to pivot towards a new venture: a white-label, peer-to-peer marketplace platform. This strategic shift created a new opportunity for me, and I was promoted to Backend Team Lead to help guide the new technical direction.

In my new role as Backend Team Lead, I was responsible for guiding the development of our white-label marketplace platform, Retavo. My role quickly expanded beyond technical execution; I collaborated directly with the startup’s leadership in brainstorming sessions, helping shape the product vision by offering both technical and business perspectives.

Continuing my close collaboration with the CTO, I focused on architecting and building a modular backend using .NET and C# while also contributing to the Angular frontend. This position required me to quickly learn the .NET ecosystem, a challenge I embraced with support from our CTO.

Beyond my own technical contributions, I was responsible for mentoring and guiding the development team. I ensured everyone had a clear understanding of the product vision and the technologies we were using. Our first major project was a complex e-commerce marketplace for a client, designed to handle user management, products, orders, payments, shipping, and content management.

While the technical team was making excellent progress, the company unfortunately faced financial difficulties and ceased operations in April 2023. Although it was difficult to see the journey end, the experience was incredibly valuable. I am grateful for the opportunity to have led such a talented and passionate team, and the knowledge I gained continues to shape my career.

During this time, I worked directly with Erica Richards, the owner of Rainey’s Closet and the first client for the Retavo platform. Her vision was to create a high-end marketplace where people could buy, sell, or rent clothing, with the platform handling core logistics like shipping, payments, taxes, and customer support.

My primary role was to bridge the gap between her business goals and the technical execution. I translated her vision into detailed requirements, managed the product backlog, and provided technical insights to inform key decisions. In addition to these product ownership responsibilities, I continued to develop features and fixes using .NET and Angular. I also managed manual deployments to AWS and PlanetScale, ensuring the client and potential investors could review our progress in real-time.

This experience was instrumental in developing my skills in product ownership and project management. Ultimately, due to financial constraints, the project’s development was outsourced to a third-party company, TeknikaCorp. Based on the trust we had built, I was asked to continue my work on the project, which led to the next chapter of my career.

Transitioning to TeknikaCorp, I continued to lead the development for Rainey’s Closet as a full-time employee. In this role, I managed a cross-functional team of five, which included a UI/UX designer, two frontend engineers, and a QA engineer, while I served as the team’s full-stack developer.

A key initiative was a complete UI/UX overhaul of the platform. I collaborated with the designer and led the frontend engineers in translating the new designs into a functional Angular web app. I was also solely responsible for all backend development and worked closely with our QA engineer to test the platform, identify bugs, and ensure a high-quality user experience. Alongside my technical duties, I continued to manage the product backlog, lead the meetings, translate client requirements into actionable tasks, and maintain project documentation. Following several development cycles, the project was put on hold for unknown reasons.

Recognizing my contributions and versatile skill set, the company leadership promoted me to lead a backend team, this time for a larger and an ambitious project.

As the leader of a four-person backend team, I led the development of “The Framework,” a new internal platform designed for versatility across various client projects. My role was comprehensive, involving everything from initial brainstorming and architectural design to hands-on feature implementation, issue resolution, and team mentorship.

The Framework’s power lies in its modular, event-driven architecture. We designed it to be highly adaptable by building core features from the ground up for maximum flexibility. These included a custom event handling system, dynamic endpoint management, custom job scheduler and more.

A key architectural achievement was making the entire system configurable at startup, which allowed us to enable or disable specific modules and features on a per-project basis. On the backend, we implemented several powerful capabilities to achieve this. We designed the system to support feature overrides, allowing our team to extend existing data models and customize validation rules to fit client’s business needs without altering the core code. We also abstracted third-party services, decoupling them from the core system to make them plug-and-play. For example, our abstract transactions module could process payments using Stripe, while emails could be sent via SendGrid or AWS SES, and logs could be directed to the Console or DataDog—all based on simple configuration changes.

The Framework was used for three client projects, each with a different domain and business model. Its modular design allowed us to share a significant portion of the codebase between them, improving efficiency and consistency.

This project was a significant growth experience. It sharpened my expertise in .NET and C#, deepened my understanding of modular and event-based systems, and enhanced my skills in leadership and mentorship. I focused on providing clear guidance and creating an environment where my talented team felt supported and empowered to push beyond their limits—a leadership philosophy inspired by the great mentors I’ve had in my own career. It remains one of the most positive and collaborative experiences of my professional journey.

This period was the busiest chapter in my career. My role grew beyond my previous duties to also cover leadership for the mobile and web frontend teams. My work became more about making high-level architectural decisions and guiding team members, but I still wrote code and fixed problems when needed. I worked very closely with other leaders, like Ryan Ramshandar, a talented Flutter engineer who led the mobile side of our Framework and client projects.

As a manager, I became responsible for helping grow our technical teams. I interviewed candidates for various roles like .NET, Angular, and Ruby on Rails developers, with experience ranging from mid-level all the way to experts from Toptal. I am particularly proud that a web developer I helped hire was later promoted to Technical Lead, which proved my sharp sight towards talented individuals.

My duties also grew to include working more directly with company leaders. I provided high-level time estimates for projects and wrote detailed reports that analyzed new project ideas. These reports were very helpful to the leadership board in deciding which projects to focus on. Working with project managers and product owners, I also gave regular progress updates and made sure we stayed true to the client’s vision.

Even though I was focused more on the big picture, I remained a hands-on technical leader. I often jumped in to help solve major issues and remove roadblocks for the development teams when they needed my skills. I continued to lead and mentor the backend team, while also sharing the project’s vision with the web and mobile engineers.

The most valuable part of this job was the people. I was lucky to work with such a talented and good team, including Ayoub Gourine, Ryan Ramshandar, and Michael Knight. Working with them made this one of the best experiences of my career.

In this role, my focus shifted to maintaining and enhancing key client projects. I supported several applications built with a .NET Core backend, MySQL databases, and an Angular frontend. I consistently leveraged my debugging skills to identify the root cause of issues across different environments and implement timely fixes.

A core responsibility was ensuring the continuous delivery of improvements and new features to various environments on AWS. To support this, I managed project backlogs to align with evolving client requirements and regularly communicated project progress and insights with team members and management.

My time with the company concluded for a combination of personal and professional reasons. I remain grateful for the valuable experience and the opportunities provided by the leadership of the company.