04 // About Me
I like building things that solve actual problems.
I'm a developer who genuinely enjoys building complete tools from start to finish. Not just copying tutorial snippets where everything works on the first try, but building real systems where data gets messy, edge cases bite, and you have to think through what happens when a network drops or a user clicks the wrong button.
I've been building and shipping since 2024—balancing freelance client work, internships, and a full-time remote role with finishing my CS degree at St. Mary's University.
I actually started out in UI/UX design at RDXDelta. I spent months obsessing over spacing tokens, color contrast, and component states in Figma. But the more interfaces I built, the more I noticed a frustrating pattern: even the cleanest design feels terrible if the backend is slow, the database queries crawl, or the API returns random 500 errors. That's what pulled me into backend development, databases, and system architecture. I wanted to understand the whole machine, not just paint the bodywork.
Living and coding in Addis Ababa also taught me to respect real-world constraints. When I built Dailybirr, I chose Telegram because asking day laborers to download a 60MB app on metered mobile data was a non-starter. When I worked on HCMS at Wawmox, clinic staff didn't care about flashy animations—they needed a queue system that wouldn't lose patient vitals and an appointment calendar that handled Ethiopian date calculations. I wrote 180+ tests for it because medical records can't tolerate guesswork.
Over time, my mindset has shifted from “can I get this to work?” to “will this be clear, stable, and easy to debug six months from now?” Between building production features, diving into algorithms with A2SV, and studying Computer Science and Mathematics at St. Mary's, I spend most of my time building, breaking things, and figuring out how they work under the hood.
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05 // Academic Foundations & Fellowship
Education & Algorithmic Training
B.Sc. in Computer Science
St. Mary's University • Minor in Mathematics
Strong focus on database systems, object-oriented software engineering, discrete mathematics, and algorithm analysis.
A2SV (Africa to Silicon Valley)
Remote Track • Data Structures & Algorithms
Rigorous algorithmic training covering graphs, dynamic programming, and complexity analysis. Solved 100+ competitive programming challenges across LeetCode and Codeforces.
06 // How I Think About Code
Four things I learned by building & breaking things
Real systems over tutorial demos
Tutorials only show the happy path where everything succeeds on the first try. Real systems force you to deal with spotty connections, dirty inputs, and people clicking things you never anticipated. That's where real learning happens.
Schema first, interface second
If your relational models and database constraints are messy, your frontend state becomes a nightmare. Getting the tables, types, and transactions solid early on makes every screen easier to build and debug.
Pragmatic over trendy
I pick tools for real constraints, not to chase trends. A Telegram bot was right for Dailybirr because workers already had it installed. Inertia.js was right for HCMS for rapid monolithic development. WinForms was right for private offline accounting.
Learn by breaking things under the hood
When something fails, I don't just copy random fixes until errors disappear. I want to know why a query is crawling, what the event loop is doing, and how to write automated tests so the same regression can never happen again.