I build.I teach.I mentor.

My father brought the first piece home: a keyboard. Just a keyboard, with no computer to plug it into. Then, almost every month, another part arrived: a mouse, a case, a motherboard. I was in primary school, and every delivery was an event I counted the days to.

I had no idea what a CPU or a hard disk did. It didn't matter. One day the pieces on the shelf became a machine that switched on, and from then on I came straight home from school to it. No manual, no teacher. Just DOS, NC, and a blinking cursor.

I called it playing. It wasn't really play, and it wasn't really study. It was years in front of a dark screen, and to me that screen was a whole world.

One day my father came home with a different kind of part: a Windows install disc. Nobody showed me what to do with it. I put it in and installed it myself, first try.

The machine rebooted into a graphical screen, and the speaker played the startup sound. After years of a dark, silent command line, the computer talked back.

It lasted a few seconds. I have carried it for decades. Some people remember their first bicycle. I remember a chime through a cheap speaker, and knowing exactly what I wanted to be near for the rest of my life.

A friend of my father's ran a computer shop in my city: he built machines, sold parts, fixed what broke. I spent my school summers there, still in my early teens.

On one of my first days, a customer ordered a computer before the owner had arrived. I was alone in the shop, a kid surrounded by the most expensive parts in the room. So I built it: motherboard, CPU, RAM, all of it. The owner walked in to find a finished, working machine and asked me one question. How did you do that?

I stayed two summers: assembling computers, installing Windows, diagnosing faults, talking customers through their options across the counter. Everyone else my age was on holiday. I was certain I had the best job in the world.

There was a certification called ICDL, the standard computer skills diploma at the time. The private institute in my city ran a prep class before the exam. I asked to skip the class and just sit the exam. They said that was not how it was done. I sat it anyway, still in high school, and got the highest score.

The institute's response was not a certificate. It was a job offer. That summer I stood in front of my first class as a teacher, and every single person in the room was older than me. One course was the staff of a local bank, adults retraining for their careers, taught by a teenager.

I kept teaching there for years, alongside my own schooling. The night before my final high school math exam, I was not at home revising. I was in a classroom, teaching. That is when I knew this was never a summer job.

My first salary went on a Canon A640. A small camera, and the start of a habit that never left.

An ad crawled across the bottom of a TV screen: WorldSkills, the world's largest vocational skills competition, sometimes called the skills olympics. I was fifteen. I went to register and found out I had missed the deadline for the 7th national competition. By one day.

So I waited a year, and I did not wait idly. At sixteen I entered the 8th national competition: first in my city, first in my state, then a Medallion for Excellence at the national final. That earned a seat at the national team camp for WorldSkills Calgary 2009. I was not chosen to fly.

Three years later, at the 10th national competition, I went first in my city, second in my state, and won the national Silver Medal. Another camp followed, for WorldSkills London 2011. Again, the plane left without me.

So I changed sides of the table. From 2010 to 2015 I coached the next wave of competitors as a WorldSkills expert and judge, and the people I trained went on to win medals of their own. I never got the flight. I built the ones who earned theirs, and that turned out to matter more.

Teaching never stopped. From 2006 I taught outside my own class hours and published free Persian video tutorials on web skills and Microsoft Office. Thousands of Persian speakers first met me as a voice explaining what a spreadsheet could really do.

Then the rooms got serious. From a small city in the north, I made it to one of the biggest universities in the country as an invited lecturer: web technologies, Excel, presenting, sometimes six hours on stage without a break, to audiences of 200+. More than ten of those sessions, alongside eleven years as a part time lecturer across four universities and colleges. More than 2,000 students in total.

Here is the part I find funny now. There was a photographer at those packed sessions. I never went to collect the photos, and almost a decade later I have no way to reach the organizers. Hundreds of people in a room, six hours of teaching, and not one frame to prove it. If you were there and have a photo, please send it to me. I am completely serious.

Teaching first, titles later. That order shaped everything.

In 2015 I was set to leave for a masters in Germany. Instead I stayed and co-founded Sarshomar, leading it as CEO with $1M from an angel investor.

The flagship product reached one million users in its first month. The team grew to fifteen. I learned what it means to carry a vision, a payroll, and money that is not yours, all at once, in my twenties. No classroom in Germany could have taught that year.

In 2019 I went again, co-founding Jibres as CTO. No investor this time. It started with one real customer on day zero, and the whole platform was built from scratch around them.

Jibres grew into one of the country's biggest omnichannel e-commerce platforms, unifying online and offline selling for more than 1,200 businesses. In 2022 it won a national award at the 14th IR Web Festival.

Sarshomar taught me to carry a vision. Jibres taught me to carry a system, one real customer at a time.

The same year I dropped the plan for Germany, I enrolled in a masters in IT management instead, part time, closer to home.

I finished the coursework and exams in the first year, while running Sarshomar full time. The thesis took much longer. I wanted it done right, not fast, and it kept getting pushed behind a business, then a second company, then a move to another country.

I defended it and finished in February 2025, a decade after I started. Ten years is a long time for one degree. I finished it anyway.

In late 2022 I made the most deliberate decision of my life. I closed Jibres, a company more than 1,200 businesses relied on, said goodbye to everything I had built and everyone who knew my name, and left.

It was not a gamble. It was future-proofing: for me, for my family, for the future my daughters get to grow up in. Three cities were on the table: Amsterdam, Munich, London. London won. The city itself, the weight of its tech scene, and one practical truth: I would rather master one language than juggle two.

I arrived on a Skilled Worker visa with a job offer, and started again as a software engineer. A CEO, then a CTO, choosing to be an engineer again in a new country. Some would call that a step back. I called it a running start.

In September 2024, the UK endorsed me as exceptional talent in technology, under the Global Talent route.

There's no sponsor on that route. An endorsing body reviews years of evidence and decides if you qualify. Mine was sixteen years in the making: two startups, thousands of students, WorldSkills medals, and everything in between.

Two years earlier I had arrived needing a sponsor. Now the UK had looked at everything I built and said: stay, on your own merit. I hold this one the closest.

I believe AI belongs inside the way a team works: in code reviews, in agents, in the definition of done. Not bolted on as a faster keyboard.

In practice that means AI reviewing every pull request, release cycles measured in days instead of months, and architecture shaped deliberately so both people and machines can work on it safely. I use it every day, including weekends. I will not stand on a stage and preach a workflow I do not live.

Since 2025 that is what I speak about at London developer events, from a session at Figma's office to a talk with Cloudflare, and to 5,000+ engineers at the AI Coding Summit.

The teenager who learned that helping others win beats winning alone never really left. Today I mentor on ADPList, 600+ sessions and counting, on roadmaps, architecture, careers, and the messy human parts nobody writes down. Most weekends I go from one call to the next, meeting engineers from countries I have never set foot in.

ADPList named me the World's Most Influential Mentor in 2024 and again in 2026, and the number one mentor in Europe. I keep the titles in perspective. What I actually chase is the moment something finally clicks for someone.

Competitor to coach, engineer to mentor, builder to team leader. It has been the same pattern the whole way through.

Away from the terminal I am a father of two daughters.

Remember the Canon A640 from my first teaching salary? It became a Nikon D5300, which became a Canon EOS R8 with a full studio setup, all listed here. The freshest frames live in my photography corner.

I am a regular at this city's developer communities, and I keep an open-source habit on GitHub.