Before the rooms I lead now, there were four companies and a lot of freelance work. Most of it was the unglamorous middle of software: databases, client projects, APIs, and documentation. All of it put my hands on every layer.
I was young, still at university, and I wanted a foot in the door. So I walked into a financial office in Tanta and offered them my services, and they said yes. I ran everything technical there: the servers, the database, the SQL that turned their records into answers, the Python scripts that brought data in and reshaped it, and simple pages to present it.
Client work, one industry after another: a dental clinic's management system, a restaurant platform with its own point of sale, an online store for a clothing brand, learning and content platforms, and sites for small businesses. Honestly, my part was mostly a junior developer's part: planned features and a lot of interface work.
I contributed to the products they sold. I owned whole API-first areas, built features and modules, wrote the documentation for them and for others, and cleaned up code bases, the unglamorous work we all did by hand before AI. Today I hand most of that work to agents, and keep the review for myself. Once I understood a requirement, they trusted me to work out the rest myself. I also took on-call support for apps in production.
A US platform that uses AI to help people find doctors and book appointments, built from many small front ends. I built two major features and one large refactor, fixed more than forty bugs, and wrote plans to make it faster. Nobody had drawn the full map of how the pieces connected, so I did.
Tanta, then Tanta again, then Kuwait from a desk in Egypt, then San Jose from the same desk. The next stop on the same route is a team in Austin, and that's the first room in the house.
Tanta
Tanta
Kuwait, remote
San Jose, remote
Austin, remote
At AZcare the product was many small front ends working as one. Each team knew its own piece. What didn't exist was the whole picture: every app, every shared piece, and every connection between them. I wrote it down, so the next person wouldn't have to rebuild it in their head.
Different companies, same habit: understand the whole thing before touching any part of it.