Why I'm writing this down

There is no shortage of writing about AI right now. There is a real shortage of writing about what happens around it — how the company gets licensed, how the first proposal gets priced, which clause in an agreement is the one that saves you six weeks of unpaid work.

That gap is the only reason this site exists.

The short version of how I got here

I studied business administration with a specialisation in accounting. I spent the early part of my working life inside spreadsheets and admin processes, which is not a glamorous origin story but turns out to be an unreasonably good one. Accounting teaches you to care about where the money actually moves, and admin work teaches you that most business problems are process problems wearing a technical costume.

Then I taught myself to write software. Not through a bootcamp or a degree conversion — just the slow, unstructured way, building things that were slightly too hard for me at the time.

Today I run Coders Technologies FZE, a licensed software company operating inside Sharjah’s research and innovation park ecosystem, building AI agents and platforms for clients who need them to work in production rather than in a demo.

What this blog is, specifically

Two things, and they depend on each other.

One: how to actually get somewhere you have not been. Not motivational posters — the specific mechanics. What the first week of learning something genuinely feels like and what to do about it. How many things you can learn at once. Which sentences people say about themselves that quietly decide the next decade. I wrote most of this down as it was happening rather than reconstructing it afterwards, which means it comes with dates attached.

Two: what serious software actually costs to build. The vendor quote I turned down, what I built instead, and what it came to on the invoice. Everyone writes about AI. Far fewer people publish the numbers, because the numbers are what stop you charging whatever the client is willing to tolerate.

The second one is what makes the first one worth reading. Motivational writing without evidence is worth very little — and the technical numbers are the evidence. That is also why this site has a journey view that arranges posts by when the thing happened rather than when I wrote it up. Read it top to bottom and you get the actual sequence, including the parts where I was wrong.

What it is not

It is not the company blog. Coders Technologies has its own site, its own clients, and its own positioning. This is the founder writing in the first person, which means I get to be specific about mistakes in a way a corporate site never can.

If you want the arc from the start, begin here. If you would rather just see what is new, the full archive is sorted newest first.