A note before you read: this piece began as my own voice notes and raw ideas — Claude wrote them up and edited them. The core opinion and the experience are mine; the wording is a partnership between us. I’d rather ship the idea alive than wait until it’s perfect.
I spent eight years learning software engineering for this moment.
August 2018. I was living abroad, far from my country, with one clear goal: build a business I could live off. And two constraints that weren’t up for negotiation: I couldn’t run anything physical from outside the country, and my capital was thin. That left exactly one road: digital. Automation and integration — build software that serves a customer I’d never sit across from in the same city.
A decision with no destination
The problem was that I had no idea what I could build. So I made a decision that looks strange from the outside: I would learn everything I could, with no idea where any of it would lead. Marketing, management, advertising, confrontation, negotiation and persuasion, building something from nothing, digital products, educational content. The road carried me until I was building software myself — I shipped more than one product and discovered a great deal along the way.
Through all those years, if you had asked me what my end goal was, I wouldn’t have had an answer. What I had was something else — a bet: when a new wave comes, I’ll be among the first to ride it. Because the tools would already be in my hands before the wave arrived, not gathered in a panic the day it hit.
Then the wave came
The AI era arrived, and I rode the wave bigger than I ever imagined. Eight years of accumulation suddenly converted into speed: I became a deeply experienced software engineer, and the day I had been waiting for finally came — building an application complex enough to compete with the products of major global companies.
Restware
It’s called Restware — an integration platform that moves data between systems and keeps it alive.
In our latest batch test, the system read more than 170,000 products from one system and converted them into another. And these aren’t copies pasted once and left to rot — they’re living records it registers and then keeps updating automatically with every change. It understands multiple warehouses, understands orders, issues invoices on its own, and runs across multiple servers in an environment with many moving dimensions.
In my experience, this is one of the hardest markets you can enter: integration serves real, operating companies that depend on the system completely, and any lapse in accuracy — from the first moment, and continuously — kills all the trust at once. Many builders avoid this market precisely because of how exacting it is. I’m glad this, of all things, is the challenge I get to take on.
As far as I’ve seen, no Arab company has an application like it, and the global players offering anything similar carry very high prices and valuations. And still — I’m at the beginning. I haven’t reached even 10% of the final vision.
Capability first — the destination follows
I didn’t know my destination for eight years. What I know now: capability gets built before the destination appears. I stacked the skills while I couldn’t see the road, and when the wave came, the destination revealed itself. Today I’ve found my place, I know my audience, I know the field I want to go deep in, and I know the project that will stay with me — and I with it.
So if you’re in your own August 2018 right now — learning, building, not knowing where it leads: capability first. The next wave won’t wait for anyone who starts learning the day it arrives.
Claude’s Questions
This section is prepared by Claude. After the article was written, the AI engine I build my work with stress-tested the argument and asked what a sharp reader would ask. I haven’t answered yet — I will when I’m free, in an update to the article or in the comments. This conversation between us is part of the idea itself.
1. “Learn everything and wait for the wave” sounds like wisdom because it worked for you. How many people stacked capability for years and their wave never came — or came in a direction their tools couldn’t serve? What makes this a repeatable strategy rather than a lottery ticket explained after the win?
Yasser will answer when he’s free — watch for an update or the comments.
2. The practitioner’s question: I’m in my own August 2018 right now. “Learn everything” isn’t a plan — what do I actually start with tomorrow morning? How do I choose what to learn with no destination to measure against, and what’s the signal that I’m compounding capability rather than scattering myself?
Yasser will answer when he’s free — watch for an update or the comments.
3. Is Restware truly the destination, or just today’s biggest wave? The “first rider” philosophy is what brought you here — if a bigger wave arrives in three years, doesn’t that same philosophy demand you leave Restware and ride it? What settles that this is the project you stop at?
Yasser will answer when he’s free — watch for an update or the comments.
