Hey! You're probably here because you're curious to know something about me. I'm Ali, a software engineer currently working at TomTom in the Netherlands.
My path from Iraq, my homeland, to the Netherlands has been quite a journey - taking me through Abu Dhabi, Damascus, Kayseri, and Istanbul along the way. This journey blessed me with languages: I speak Arabic, English, Turkish, and I'm currently learning Dutch.
My love story with coding began in late 2008. I had this dream of creating a dictionary like Sakhr Dictionary (قاموس صخر), which was huge in the Arab world at the time. I got lucky finding these Egyptian tutors who were selling VB.net tutorial CDs in Arabic - thanks to those guys, I turned my dream into reality within a year. That success got me into C#.
2010 brought a new challenge: I wanted to control an RC car from my PC. The serial port made this possible, but I needed to understand electronics. That's when I discovered a lifesaver - "Physics of Electronics" (كتاب فيزياء الإلكترونيات) by Dr. Subhi Said Al-Rawi. This book taught me how transistors work, which led me to C, then C++. I went all in on embedded systems, buying every tool I needed.
From 2010 to 2019, I lived and breathed embedded systems. I learned everything from image processing to CPU architectures and various low-level topics. I even learned to make things work with just 6KB of memory!
2012 introduced me to Objective-C, and since then, iOS development has been my main focus, alongside PCB design and C/C++. In 2018, my master's thesis pulled me into AI territory, where I picked up Python - and honestly, after C++, it felt like a breath of fresh air! A year later, I dove into Rust, using it extensively for a mini PNC Controller project on ARM Cortex-M33 (still unreleased, but staying tuned!).
My main languages are Swift, C/C++, Objective-C/C++, Python, and Rust. I also work with Ruby, JS/TS, and Kotlin, though I'm still learning the ropes with those.
You can explore some of my embedded systems work and other projects on my GitHub - I enjoy sharing what I learn with the community.