Engineer. Builder. Writer.
I was never going to be only one.

I trained as an electrical and computer engineer at UT Austin and graduated in the spring of 2023, into a market where the tech companies were shedding tens of thousands of people a week.

I competed against the computer scientists anyway and won a software engineering job. I lost it in under six months. I rebuilt, took up boxing and storytelling in earnest, and was made to lead a team of twenty-three engineers. The office closed the next morning. Before I had been out of school a year, I had been told twice that I was not needed.

So I learned to work with my hands. Welding, plumbing, framing, landscaping in the Texas sun, honest labour, odd jobs, nights spent sleeping in my car with my balance negative for the first time in my life. I did Hajj. From that ground I built ShieldStone Labs, a boutique software firm, and I am building a startup, DumpsterSuite, with a friend. And underneath every version of the work, through the firing and the rebuilding and the silence, I wrote.

I was born in Austin to a family from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, and I spent half my childhood in Qatar and Dubai. I carry the Arabic literary tradition the way other people carry an accent. It is in everything I write, whether the page is in English or not.

What I believe is simple. Trust yourself, and you stop asking the world for permission to become who you already are. Stand in your power. Everyone alive deserves more than survival. Everyone deserves a life with dignity in it, and that is rarer than it should be. Home is not an address. My neighbours are the people next door and the people an ocean away, and taking care of that home is the work.