Local first
Understand the people before choosing the product model.
I build products for the MENA region from the inside out. Not imported products translated into Arabic. Products shaped by our own culture.
For too long, our digital lives have been shaped by products designed somewhere else.
Someone else's assumptions.
Someone else's social rules.
Someone else's culture.
Translating an interface into Arabic does not make a product Arab.
I want to build products that understand how we meet, communicate, build relationships, work and live.
Technology carries culture. We should write more of that culture ourselves.
We've imported enough software. We don't have to import the culture with it.
Understand the people before choosing the product model.
Global conventions are design choices, not universal laws.
Localization should go deeper than language, colors and payment methods.
I'm Ahmed Gamal Hassan — a software architect and Founder & CEO of CloudAura LLC , building independent internet products from Egypt.
I design systems.
I build products.
Technologies are implementation details.
Software architecture is not about choosing the fashionable stack.
The system comes first. Architecture follows the problem. Technology follows the architecture.