I started writing software professionally in the year 2000, in Alexandria, Egypt, with no team and no investors. Just a laptop and the conviction that good Middle-East-focused software did not have to be imported.

Soon after, I spent a short period in Moscow, learning new technologies first-hand. The trip was brief but transformative — a reset on what was possible, and a notebook full of ideas that would shape the next two decades of work.

In 2003 I moved to Cairo as the work scaled. New customers, new edge cases. The first deployments. The first lost backups. The first time I watched a sqlcmd command turn a year's worth of Arabic data into mojibake — and the first time I learned the value of a parameterized query.

In 2005 I settled in Kuwait. The Gulf taught me pricing, expectations, and the art of saying "yes — but here are the limits." That same year, a phone call from a desperate AC company changed everything: Kazma Center for AC and Cooling had lost its system data. I came in to rescue what was left, and a 21-year partnership with Waleed AlHadlaq was quietly born.

From 2006 onward, products launched in chronological order: 2006 — AC maintenance system (born from the Kazma rescue: AC unit maintenance, service contracts, cost accounting, area & HP/PTU sizing). 2007 — schools system. 2008 — accounting & ERP. The codebase grew. So did the technical debt.

By 2015 I hit a wall. The codebase had become a tangle of bespoke per-customer forks. Bugs that were fixed in one tenant's installation reappeared months later in another. Customer trust eroded. Two choices: quit, or rebuild. I chose to rebuild — and rebuild I did. Standardized data access. Parameterized everything. A fixer system that scans every install and tells us what is broken before the customer does. Migration scripts. Real deployment.

And then luck broke our way. Around 2018 I made a strategic bet: rewrite the flagship products from desktop to full web applications. The work was hard and the upfront investment was painful — but it landed months before the COVID-19 pandemic. When the world locked down in 2020, every customer suddenly needed remote-first software. Ours was already there. Adoption surged. The bet paid off bigger than we knew.

From 2019 onward, A1Schools v2, A1-AC, WhatsAPI Pro, TradeVision, SSL Manager, ERP, POS, HR, Hospital, TimeSheet, AC, SMS, Trade — twelve products grew out of years of customer pain I had finally learned to listen to.

Today A1-Soft has 500+ clients in 20+ countries. I still write code. I still find bugs in production. I still occasionally make the same mistakes I made in 2003. But I have learned to admit it, fix it fast, and write a script so it never happens again.

That is what A1-Soft is. Not perfection. Persistence — across four cities, twelve products, and 26 years.

Behind every long technical journey is a partner who never lost faith — even on the days the codebase did. Waleed AlHadlaq has been that partner since the early Kuwait years, and today he serves as General Manager of A1-Soft.

Kuwait, 2005 — How it began. It started with a phone call from Kazma Center for AC and Cooling. Waleed's company had lost its system data — gone. I came in to rescue what was left, rebuild what was missing, and stabilize the business. By the time the data was restored, a partnership had been quietly born — and a 21-year working relationship was already taking shape.

From that crisis grew the first product that would carry both our names: the AC maintenance system of 2006 — born from the very rescue that brought us together. AC unit maintenance, service contracts, cost accounting, area and HP/PTU sizing. We learned the AC industry from the inside, because Waleed lived it every day and refused to settle for software that did not understand it.

When customer trust eroded in 2015 and the choice was quit-or-rebuild, Waleed chose to stay. When mojibake corrupted a year of Arabic data in production, Waleed sat through the all-nighters. When the rewrite took longer than promised — and it always took longer than promised — Waleed kept the customers calm, kept the contracts alive, and kept the cash flow moving so the engineering could continue.

His patience with a developer who often disappeared for weeks into a code refactor, his calm in front of frustrated clients who wanted answers we did not yet have, his discipline in running the day-to-day operations of a growing company while the architecture underneath kept being torn down and rebuilt — these are not footnotes in the A1-Soft story. They are the foundation.

As General Manager, Waleed handles what I cannot: the relationships, the contracts, the human side of running a company that ships software. He absorbs operational stress so the engineering can continue. He says the hard things to customers when they need to hear them. He keeps the lights on while I keep the codebase alive.

Twenty-one years. Three offices. Twelve products. Hundreds of late nights. Thousands of bug fixes. One partnership that quietly held everything together.

"Some partnerships are about the contract. Ours has always been about the long game."