From the workshop to building businesses

My father makes furniture. Growing up, his workshop was the place I understood best — the smell of cut timber, the sound of a machine finding its line, the way a finish either looks right or does not and no argument changes it.

I learned the trade the way you learn anything from a parent: by being handed things. Materials, tolerances, what wood does in heat, why a joint fails. And underneath it the lesson I keep going back to — making something real is slow, unforgiving, and worth it.

I thought I was helping my dad. I was learning how a production business works.

At Benha University I started Computer Science and found that software had the one thing wood does not: you can be wrong cheaply. In a workshop a mistake costs material and a day. In code it costs a minute.

Between April and October 2024 I completed the Digital Egypt Pioneers Program on the React Web Developer track, sponsored by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. What mattered was not only the syllabus — it put me in a room with people doing the same thing, at the same stage, taking it seriously.

I started taking client work while I was still a student. A site here, a fix there, then larger builds: recruitment platforms in Saudi Arabia, industrial catalogues for companies in the UAE and Italy, a freight forwarder in Cairo, e-commerce stores.

Eleven of those sites are on this website, alongside the one I later built for my own company. What they taught me was not React. It was how a business actually makes money, where it leaks, and why the person paying you cares about something entirely different from what you find interesting.

I became a Freelancing Trainer and Software Developer Coach within the Digital Egypt Pioneers Initiative — working with people a year or two behind where I was.

The technical part is the easy part. What they actually needed was the rest of it: a portfolio that shows something, a profile that reads like a professional, a proposal that does not undersell, and the confidence to talk to a client who is paying in a currency they have never invoiced in.

Teaching it made me better at it. You cannot hand-wave through an explanation when someone is going to go and try it on Monday.

I work as an Events & Community Organizer with the Huawei Cloud Developer Group in New Cairo — organising technology events and workshops, coordinating speakers, handling logistics, and supporting the partnerships that make an event possible.

The work is unglamorous and almost entirely invisible when it goes well. But a room full of developers who found each other is worth more than most of what happens on a stage, and someone has to build the room.

In December 2024 I took part in a conference in Cairo on irregular migration — the kind of event where the subject is young people leaving, and the real question is what would have to be true for them to stay.

My part was the practical one. Training initiatives, employment, and freelance work that earns foreign currency from a desk in Egypt are not an answer to everything. But they are a real alternative, and I was in the room because I am one of the people they worked for.

I was also invited onto Al-Mehwar TV to talk about my journey and about localising technology skills in Egypt. You get four minutes to say something that took four years, and you learn quickly which parts matter.

In 2025, five of us started AKL HOME — me and four of my cousins. An Egyptian furniture company with manufacturing behind it and a modern online operation in front of it.

We had the craft already; it is the family trade. What we built was everything around it: the brand, the product line, the store, the systems, and a team across design, content, customer service and media buying.

I am Co-Founder and CTO — one of five partners, not the owner. The website was the easy part. Coordinating manufacturing, stock, delivery and a growing team while demand moves is the actual job.

I love software engineering and I expect I always will. But the ambition underneath it is bigger than writing code for other people, or even for my own company.

I want to build products, factories, manufacturing companies, institutions. Things that employ people, make something real, and are still standing after I stop paying attention to them.

I am nowhere near that yet. I am 22, one company in, learning most of this in public. I am not a business coach and I have not figured it out. I am doing the work and writing down what happens.