journey

started a physical newspaper business. wrote satirical newspapers about teachers, created a custom currency, controlled supply and circulation. classmates and teachers loved it. my first taste of building something from scratch.

found Wix from a youtube ad. built my first website. wanted more than something you could just view — wanted digital currency and online newspapers. these website builders couldn't do what i needed, which eventually pushed me toward code.

discovered free domain names from a youtube video. couldn't get it working for years due to technical issues. the frustration planted the seed for wanting to understand how the internet actually works.

pandemic life was actually peak. PS4 shared with siblings and dad — CTR, disc games at ~200 AED each. discovered fortnite through a friend. chapter 2 season 2. bought my first battle pass with eidi money. i still have the entire map memorized.

after years of trying, finally registered a .tk domain. the excitement of having my own domain name was real. went on to register over 70 free domains.

went on a building spree during covid. over 300 wordpress sites, all side projects, using infinityfree, profreehost, and cpanel. none went anywhere, but learned more about web infrastructure than any course could teach.

signed up for the openai api, got $18 in free credit. discovered GPT-3.5. had no idea the ai hype train existed — just thought it was cool tech.

built an ai tool to easily access gpt models (gpt-3.5 back then) to different students across the world. grew to 510+ users in 6 months. first experience with real user feedback, scaling issues, and customer support. learned about product design through how people used it in unexpected ways.

began with 5–20 km walks around dubai. mapped out everything within a 4-hour range. got tired of walking once i'd covered it all, so started running. preferred distance: 10k.

asked for crypto instead of a birthday gift at 13. tried copytrading, derivatives, spot, options, forex. lost over 90% in ~2 years. learned about scams, ponzi schemes, and the psychology of risk. the most expensive education i've had.

bought a bike in the uae summer heat. did over 1,000 km in 6 months. favourite route: home to dubai mall/burj khalifa area (~50 km round trip). cycling gave me so much more range than walking ever could.

got a mini pc (4.9 ghz, 32gb ddr5) — ran plex, jellyfin, openvpn, mined xmr on spare cores. kept crashing. replaced and refunded. now running a raspberry pi (16gb ram) with ubuntu and openvpn. planning appwrite.

first role at datamation. created promotional commercials for company products including an HR management tool. first exposure to working with a real software company.

built a fullstack next.js + pocketbase app for bank reconciliation statements with agentic AI. didn't ship after 5 months. learned painful lessons about scope creep, overplanning, and shipping MVPs first.

first year-long role. reviewed contributor notes, ran onboarding calls, did QA testing. learned about professionalism, team communication, and working in an organization. reports to academic content manager.

picked running back up after a break. current 5k PB: 19:06. resting heart rate consistently at 41 bpm (30-min avg), absolute low of 35 bpm.

started a longer-term internship working on react applications. building on the relationship established through earlier content and fullstack work.

developed a complete fullstack nextjs app from scratch for a community with ~8,000 users. rebuilding the entire platform from static astro to full next.js + appwrite. notes system, blog, admin tools, support tickets, version history, migration tools.

15 years old. 28 months of work experience across 3 companies. running arch linux on a huawei matebook 14. tracking everything on garmin. still learning, still building, still losing money occasionally. but getting better at all of it.