We're excited to share that Ali Fadel is joining as our founding engineer .

Ali has been a software engineer for the last 6 years. He has worked on a wide range of exciting projects, collaborated with open-source libraries, built personal projects visited by hundreds of thousands monthly. His most recent role was at Amazon.

Here's more about him in his own words.

How did you get into tech?

By chance, I was the techy guy in my family, playing games, installing windows, repairing laptops, etc.. and I was planning to study civil engineering.
In my high school, I learnt about programming (Visual Basic 6 specifically), and changed my mind totally.
I started to write spaghetti programs like a calculator, then I learnt about databases, and created some basic systems to help my father with his job. After ~2 years with VB6, I explored C++, PHP, C#, Java, then I got into Ruby, and never looked back.

Starting from 2015, I was learning Rails, and since then I've been a full-stack developer using the old boring plain HTML, CSS and JS technologies with Rails.
While studying in college, I learnt about machine learning, since then I was trying to connect my full-stack knowledge with machine learning.

And this is what I'm doing currently in all of my open-source projects and my full-time job.

Why are you at MilkStraw?

I don't like to work on a very specific cog in a huge machine. I like to build the machine, get involved in all the parts, and deliver the product to the market.
MilkStraw provides me with the opportunity to do that, unlike other jobs where I would be a cog in a machine. Either developing the backend, frontend, AI, or even devops.

In addition to this, MilkStraw solves a real problem exists in today's cloud platforms, and I believe the team can solve it better than anyone else.

Where do you find inspiration?

Mostly from discussions with my friends, or from customers feedbacks, looking for pain points and solutions.Those are the sources of inspirations that lead any engineer to build something useful.

What does your desktop/home screen look like?

Favorite tool?

Ruby on Rails. It is a framework, but also it is a tool! I can build anything with it, from a simple website to a complex AI-powered application.
Each time I want to build something, I just write `rails new great_name` and start working.

Favorite hotkey?

Cmd + P

Favorite place to visit?

Mosques and quiet coffee shops.

Advice for ambitious engineers?

Build your own machine, end-to-end, from the idea, to the product, to the market. Start with a simple machine, and then build a bigger one.Don't be afraid to start small, and then grow. Focus on your next step only, don't try to build the whole machine at once. This is the only way I personally learn.