2013 to 2017
Learned to build at San Diego State.
I earned a B.S. in computer science at San Diego State. What stuck came from the courses where the assignment was open-ended enough to be a real problem. That is where I picked up the habit I still work by: understand the problem before touching the code, then build the smallest thing that solves it well.
Qualcomm
Learned what scale looks like.
I interned at Qualcomm while I was still at San Diego State, working alongside engineers whose chips were in the phone in my pocket. It was my first look at engineering at real scale, and at how much quiet care goes into work that millions of people rely on without ever noticing it. I have wanted to build to that standard since.
Peoria
A hackathon, a map, and a second place.
Caterpillar took me to Peoria, Illinois, which is about as far from San Diego as a place can feel. In 2017 a few of us entered a civic hackathon and built a map of the city's road work, so residents could see what was torn up and when it would be finished. We took second. I learned more that weekend than in the months around it.
Credit unions
Software people rely on.
At Corelation I built the front end of core banking software. Tellers used it all day, every day, and a slow screen was not a nitpick; it was somebody's line getting longer. That work taught me reliability is a craft rather than a chore. Dependable software, done carefully, is one of the most respectful things you can build for people.
Zefr
Now: making the agents better.
I am a Staff Software Engineer at Zefr, working across the full stack. Everything I build now goes into our agents and the stack around them: the front ends, APIs and MCP servers they run on, and the agents themselves. The customers are still people. The agents are how we do more for them, which means every layer has to be fast and considered.
Staff, to me, is not a larger version of senior. It is being answerable for the decisions that are expensive to undo.
Two languages
English and Kurdish.
I grew up speaking Kurdish at home and English everywhere else. Moving between them early makes you notice how much meaning sits in one word, and how easily a sentence lands wrong. I think that is why I care about naming things well, and why I would rather write a plain sentence than a clever one.
What I care about
Fast, considered, and shipped.
Fast, because waiting is a decision somebody made. Considered, because the details people cannot name are the ones they feel. Shipped, because unreleased work helps nobody. With a team, because nothing I am proud of was built alone.