I'm   Ahmed  Ali.

This is hard, writing about myself. I have been putting this off for some time, which meant the website had "lorem ipsum" on this page for some time now 😂. I want to get this page to the "done" column, so here we go. I'll have to come back and probably remove my rambling, but I like it 😃.

I went to university for civil engineering, and around my second year, a friend, Allan, suggested I have a look at the Stanford programming course. It was in Java, and I remember the professor, Mehran Sahami (I wonder what he is up to nowadays), left an impression on me right from the first video. I would dream about what it would be like to be in his class. I forgot to mention I studied Civil Engineering in China. The professors taught in English, though. The location of where I went to uni is not important, but if you are going to follow me on this journey, I want you to have the full picture.

Back to the Stanford course, I watched a few of the videos and even tried doing the assignments, and it was really fun. But I had to focus on uni work, so I stopped. It's now my final year of uni, and I am working on my graduation project, designing a five-story reinforced concrete building. At the back of my mind, I'm thinking that I need to find a way to do programming full-time, but I can't go back to uni for four years. I don't have that kind of money. After graduation, I decided to do one year of Chinese language (it's funny, only English-speaking people correct you and say, "You mean Mandarin").

During that one year, I thought maybe if I went back to Kenya and became a civil engineer, with time, maybe I would fall in love with it, but I couldn't see myself doing it. So I talked to my sister, and like the legend she is, she mentioned her friend's sister did this bootcamp in Kenya called Moringa. So I checked out their website, and they looked legit. I finished my one year of Chinese language and headed back to Kenya.

Okay, let me rush through the story a bit now. I got into the bootcamp, and after six months of an intensive course, I got my first job at FrontlineSMS as a Junior Software Engineer. Shout out to Sitati Kituyi for giving me a chance.

Hi, I'm Ahmed, by the way, a software developer based in Kenya with seven years of experience now. I'm currently interested in building performant applications with a native-like feel. I think local-first applications will be the next wave, so I am hoping to share my learnings on that and also dream of building a SaaS or a consultancy that will give me financial and time freedom 😃.