Self-taught on a Nokia keypad. Now I make machines talk.

I wrote my first code in 2012, at 15, growing up in a village with no broadband — just a Nokia 2700 classic, a Java feature phone with a numeric keypad, on a 2G connection. I spent my evenings on forums like Master-Land, reading everything I could find about how websites were made, and built my first sites with mobile site builders like Wapka, XtGem and Wen.ru, entirely from that phone.

In 2013 I wanted more control than the builders gave me, so I started working in the code of JohnCMS, an open-source PHP CMS, with Google open in the next tab. That turned into MobiBD, my own modified version of JohnCMS, which became popular in the community I'd learned from.

In 2014 I got my first laptop, an Intel Celeron machine, and moved on to WordPress — and, alongside it, digital marketing. All of this ran next to a diploma in mechanical engineering, which is where my feel for machines comes from.

My first job, in 2018, was as Head of Digital for a contracting company in the UAE, working remotely and leading their move online. I kept programming on the side: I completed Programming Hero's course to learn JavaScript and the MERN stack properly, and worked through a CSE degree at the same time. The degree filled in some theory, but almost everything I use at work I taught myself by building things.

Since then I've completed freelance projects on Fiverr and Upwork for clients in Switzerland, the USA and the UAE, and worked full-time on full-stack products for teams in Thailand and Germany. Today, at Alpine Energy, I configure EXOR HMI panels, connect PLCs and sensors to the cloud and build the software on top. I also build AI-backed tools, and a Flutter app of mine is closing in on 100,000 installs on Google Play.

I'm not a magician. I'm patient: 2G taught me to keep at a problem until it works, and I still love the learning. I keep things simple — KISS — because simple systems keep running after handover.