About

Algeria

I spent my childhood between Tébessa and Oum El Bouaghi. Tébessa is full of ruins left by empires that came and went. Oum El Bouaghi is smaller and quieter. Back then, most homes didn’t have internet, and people sent each other memes over Bluetooth. My family ran an internet café, so I learned to type before I could write, memorizing website addresses key by key.

I always loved building things, but even something as simple as a glue gun was hard to find. The internet was where those limits didn’t exist, slow and frustrating as it was. I got into football through Ronaldinho and Messi clips on YouTube, and ended up talking to people in countries I’d only seen on a map. That’s how computers and software got hold of me.

Charaf as a boy at the breakfast table in Algeria

Qatar

My family moved to Qatar when I was thirteen, and I spent my teenage years there. One day I stumbled on a C# tutorial without knowing what a programming language even was. Somehow that led to WordPress, and to my first freelance websites while I was still in school.

Charaf as a teenager at his desk under a lamp at night in Qatar

Türkiye

I went to university in Istanbul to study software engineering. I loved going deep on the fundamentals, with some data science and machine learning along the way. That’s also where I met a three-month-old kitten named Theo, who followed me to the desk every day and was more or less my pair-programming buddy. Right after graduating, I joined Bricks.

Theo the cat sitting on the keyboard, next to a breadboard circuit and a Home Health Monitor dashboard

Malaysia

Then Malaysia, where I work remotely and help lead product and engineering at Bricks, a visual site builder for WordPress. I like routine and a quiet home, so travelling was never the plan. I was moving between Airbnbs while looking for a long-term apartment, went to another city to look there too, and somewhere along the way it occurred to me that I didn’t have to stop. So I put most of my stuff in a storage unit, bought a backpack, and kept going: around Malaysia, then to nearby countries in Asia.

Some of the best conversations I’ve had were with strangers I had almost nothing in common with on paper: no shared language, religion or childhood. Being that far from home and meeting people from everywhere also made me reflect more on my own culture and history.

Food took me a while. Some dishes made no sense to me the first time. Then, after a few tries, my taste caught up and I started to love them. Learning a new language felt exactly like that, and so did getting to know a new culture. At first it’s just noise, and then one day it isn’t.

Charaf on a jet ski with a friend in Langkawi

When I started at Bricks, I was arrogant enough to think good products came from thinking hard in my own head. They don’t, not alone. Using Bricks every day myself turned out to be no substitute for talking to the people who build with it.

There’s a concept I try to live by called ihsan: doing something as well as you can, with care, even when no one is checking. I like meeting people who take care in what they do, whatever it is.

Outside of work, I’m still into computer science and machine learning, both the theory and the engineering side. It’s what I’ve started writing about here. Beyond that: tinkering with electronics, chess, and football, playing casually and watching.