I started my journey back in 2005 as a web developer working for Net Design Plus. I was 20 years old at the time, had graduated a year ahead of schedule and had already landed my first job … for my family, I was a “success” story!
Working for Net Design Plus was an amazing phase in my life as I got the chance to learn and master different technologies and was exposed to several challenging products. During my time there, I developed over 30 web applications for industries in different sectors located between Lebanon and Qatar. But I wasn’t completely satisfied; something felt missing. The company fed me a lot of projects and threw many challenges but still, it wasn’t enough.
Fast forward five years, in 2010, I was approached by Domtech who asked me to help establish the Domtech Web Solutions department. Back then, the company only dealt with hardware solutions and wanted to augment its services by introducing web applications as well.
At Domtech, I was the department manager responsible for sales, marketing, management and development. I designed a proprietary framework and on-boarded around 30 clients in 3 years. Together, Domtech and I helped dozens of clients in Lebanon adopt digital transformation, and some of these clients where governmental institutions.
One day, In 2013, I was having lunch with a friend from university days, we haven’t seen each other for a long time and he asked me what I do. Of course I bragged about my story and the accomplishments I have done so far. Then he said, “so you have been doing the same thing for the last 8 years; you must be really good at it, amazing!”.
To be honest, I felt proud and disappointed at the same time when he said that. I mean I was doing well, but the idea of doing the same thing over and over made me feel as if I plateaued at some point and I didn’t notice that!
First Pivot!
Later on that year, I joined the world wide Rakuten family and became a member of the core development team at Rakuten Loyalty which was based in Boston USA. At the time, Rakuten was expanding fast throughout the United States and was acquiring big firms and merchants like www.buy.com and www.viber.com, transforming them to become part of the Rakuten Family (more).
For me it was exciting; new unfamiliar territory, harder new challenges, no longer doing small to medium scale projects … leveling up! By then, i was making more money and I was building internal systems that served millions of users and handled terabytes of data on a monthly basis.
Second Pivot!
I spent 2 years designing and building systems for high traffic load. I realized that this wasn’t an easy job because there was a lot of plumbing to do. The amount of work that engineers needed to put to set up and configure the systems they are building and the environments that these systems should run on required a huge effort. And they haven’t started to code what these systems were supposed to do!
So by the end of 2015, I left the Rakuten family and I co-founded the open source platform (SOAJS). SOAJS helps engineers build microservices and APIs in just a few minutes. The approach was to automate all the common steps that an engineer puts in place and remove all the gears that he needs to add to the systems he is building allowing him to focus more on dictating what the system should do. By end of 2018, the SOAJS technology reached around 650 thousand downloads and is still growing till this day.
Right Now!
Working on the SOAJS project shed light on several painful areas that products might face and cause if these products were not planned and implemented via a solid strategy. That’s when I realized that there are many people out there facing the same problem when it comes to launching products successfully and see them evolve and grow over time.
Today, I use the knowledge and skillset I have acquired over the years to help others with amazing, innovative and creative ideas push them into the market and see them achieve their dreams.
I have more than a decade of experience on how to build scalable products that serve big markets and that can adapt to change. This experience spans over several areas from planning, architecting, designing, building, implementing, deploying, managing and maintaining product solutions over the web.
I also coach and consultant as cloud solution architect and I have helped several clients build many products, apps, e-commerce, marketplaces, directory search engines and SAAS solutions. Currently, I live in Beirut – Lebanon operating as an independent Cloud Solutions Architect and can be reached via this website and via my LinkedIn.
Nothing makes me happier than seeing the look on people’s faces when their dreams come to life. I am always eager to hear your story, I am always ready to help out and it is always a pleasure working with people with ideas to change the world we live in to a better place.
