People sometimes ask how I went from a country with intermittent power and patchy internet to running a software company. The honest answer is: the same way anyone does — slowly, with a lot of help, and by reading more than I wrote.

The Syrian Virtual University changed everything

For most of my generation, the standard path is a campus university with a fixed schedule, fixed curriculum, and fixed assumptions. The Syrian Virtual University was different: I could study Information Engineering at my own pace, online, while working. That format suited me, and it suits a lot more people than the system pretends.

What worked

• Build before you study. The hours I spent shipping small projects taught me more than the textbooks. The textbooks taught me what to call the things I was already doing.
• Pick one stack and finish things in it. I started with PHP because I could deploy it on cheap shared hosting. By the time I outgrew it, I had shipped enough to know what I actually wanted from a stack.
• Read source code. Open-source codebases are the best teachers. Pick a project you use. Read its tests. Then read its commits.
• Find a mentor, even a remote one. Mine were random strangers on forums and Stack Overflow. They never knew they were teaching me.

What I'd tell my 20-year-old self

1. Output every week. Even tiny output. Not output → no learning.
2. Boring projects in production teach you more than exciting projects in your head.
3. The internet doesn't care where you live. Show up consistently and people show up back.
4. Don't apologize for your country. Just do good work.

From DevOps to founder

I worked as a DevOps engineer at YesSoft for years before founding Cyberv. Operating other people's systems is the best preparation for building your own. You learn what breaks at 3 AM. You learn what lies dashboards tell. You learn that "it works on my machine" is the most expensive sentence in software.

Founding Cyberv was the natural next step: take everything I learned operating, building, and reviewing — and put it into a company where every line of code is a small bet on doing this work better than yesterday.

If you're reading this from somewhere the world says you can't build from, I'm proof you can.