Articles
I've built 30+ products over 20 years — some shipped and still running, some sold, some abandoned, some that never made it past a prototype. These articles cover what that actually looks like: where AI-powered products break in practice, how to scope an MVP when you've watched your own fail to validate, and what it costs to wear all the technical hats at once. Practical and specific — not startup advice for its own sake.
The products I've built that are still running years later all went live within the first two weeks. The ones I spent months on before anyone touched them are mostly gone. This is what building in silence actually costs — for client work and for your own products.
Every Dubai startup faces the same tech stack question. The wrong answer — driven by novelty, VC blog posts, or a developer who likes interesting problems — costs 12–18 months. Here's the opinionated, boring stack that ships fast and scales when you need it to.
A full-time CTO in Dubai costs AED 60,000–90,000 per month all-in. Fractional CTO services fill the gap — but the deliverables, pricing, and quality vary widely. Here's what a real engagement includes and how to evaluate providers in the UAE market.
A free browser-based tool that tracks expiry dates for visas, Emirates IDs, passports, and other documents, then exports an .ics file you import into your calendar once. The calendar does the reminding — you never need to open the app again. Nothing uploaded, no account required.
The products that worked and the ones that failed had one consistent difference: whether I started from an existing workflow or from a problem I thought I understood. It took a long time and a lot of failed builds to see it clearly.
The 'Forward Deployed Engineer' label is getting mocked on socials. Some of that mockery is fair — people are absolutely rebranding old work to charge more. But opportunists showing up to game a label is a signal, not a rebuttal.