THE ARCHIVE
CHAPTER I — THE SPARK
It started with a YouTube video my uncle showed me. An Arduino — a small green board — was blinking an LED and making a motor spin. I remember thinking: this thing is alive. I downloaded the Arduino IDE that same week. Started using Proteus 7 for simulation since I didn't have the hardware. Watched every tutorial I could find — and there weren't many back then. Eventually I ran out of content and stopped. But something had already been planted.
CHAPTER II — THE FIRST CERTIFICATE
A few years later, I found an ad for the One Million Arab Coders initiative — a Udacity program, based in Dubai but thankfully online. That was my first real exposure to web development. HTML. CSS. A little Python. Nothing fancy, but it was enough to show me that the internet was just code — and code was something I could write. I finished the course. Got my first certificate. It was a PDF. I was unreasonably proud of it.
CHAPTER III — THE UNIVERSITY YEARS
I had options for college. I chose Ain Shams — and it turned out to be one of the better decisions I've made, though not for the reasons you'd expect. The curriculum was fine. The facilities were whatever. But I found people there — Z3ln, Seif, and others — and from the first year we started building things together. Projects for class. Projects for fun. Projects for hackathons. I genuinely can't count how many. We eventually formalized it into something: the Masons. A team, a GitHub org, a shared obsession with shipping.
CHAPTER IV — THE AGENCY YEARS
After university started, I joined Webbingstone as a software support intern. Learned WordPress. Did not fall in love with WordPress. But then I got handed a real project. Eventy — an event management platform with custom form builders, and an organizer dashboard. I built it alone. Seven or eight months. It worked. Then came PostPilot — a multi-platform social media scheduling SaaS. Eight more months. Still alone. Still worked. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I noticed the agency was running on six different tools that didn't talk to each other. That observation became an idea. The idea became AgencyKit.
CHAPTER V — STILL BUILDING
The work doesn't stop. It slows sometimes, it changes shape, but it doesn't stop. There's something I keep coming back to — not a methodology or a framework, just a habit. Late nights, a dark screen, and Fayrouz somewhere in the background. Not as ambiance. More like a reminder that some things are built to last. That's the only standard worth caring about.