Journey
How curiosity became engineering
This isn't a résumé. It's the actual timeline — from Grade 10 HTML in Notepad to building an AI system meant to work in Somali. Some of the parts that felt smallest at the time turned out to matter the most.
Where it started
I started learning web development in 2023, in Grade 10. At the very beginning I was writing basic HTML in Notepad — no editor, no tooling, just plain text and a browser refresh. HTML was the first technology I ever learned.
I didn't have a career plan. I kept asking myself the same questions: how was this made? Can I build something like this? How does this actually work? That curiosity, not a plan, is where everything else started.
Learning to build
In 2024 I went deeper and learned the MERN stack, building several projects along the way. One of them mattered more than the rest: a real-estate management system, which I used for my full-stack web development certification and defended as part of finishing the program.
That project became one of the real foundations of everything that came after — it was eventually turned into a SaaS product that generates meaningful income today.
The day I almost quit
Also in 2024, while working on a coding assignment, I got stuck. Not for an hour — for around five hours, on code that simply would not run. I didn't understand AI tools well enough yet to lean on them the way I can now, so it was just me, the error, and a lot of frustration.
At some point I was crying, because I'd spent that much time on something that still wasn't working. The problem turned out to be one line.
That stayed with me. Software engineering isn't always about writing more code — sometimes the hardest part is understanding why the system isn't behaving the way you think it should.
Discovering AI
Around the end of 2024 I started paying real attention to AI — mostly models built by companies and researchers outside Somalia. That got me thinking: could I build something genuinely capable in my own native language?
That question turned into something bigger than just using AI tools. I got interested in how the models actually worked — how they're trained, how they understand language, how multimodal systems work, and what it actually takes to build and evaluate one.
From learning to production
In 2025 I started seriously using Next.js and TypeScript, and I built a production system for a restaurant that actually used it.
That was a different kind of building. A project for yourself can break and only you notice. Software someone else depends on has to just work. That year I learned more about solving real problems, reliability, user needs, and what happens to code after it ships — not just getting it to run once.
It was the shift from building projects to building software for real users.
From local to global
In 2026 I started TTMCHANGE. The idea came from something I noticed at my university, Hormuud University — workflows that were still heavily dependent on Excel and worksheets. Instead of accepting that as normal, I asked why not build a proper system for it. So I did.
Then came the next question: if I could solve this for my own university, why not solve similar problems for other organizations? That's what turned TTMCHANGE from a university project into a software company. The simplest way to describe it: from local to global.
Hayaan
Also in 2026, I started building Hayaan — an experiment toward a Somali-first AI system. The ambition is to work across modalities: Somali text, images, video, PDFs, and long-form information, with long-context understanding as one of the directions I'm exploring, targeting something around a 1M-token context window.
None of that is a finished capability yet — it's a direction, not a result. Hayaan needs a lot more: compute, infrastructure, data, research, evaluation, model development. The goal isn't another AI wrapper. It's to build something genuinely capable in Somali, and eventually take that further.
01 — Started a SaaS startup
Building software as a real business rather than only as projects.
02 — Started Hayaan
Beginning the journey toward a Somali-first AI system.
03 — Started AI research
Moving beyond simply using AI and beginning to study how AI systems are actually built and evaluated.
What changed
Early on, engineering looked relatively easy from the outside. What I understand now is that it's much deeper than writing code — it's system design, security, architecture, reliability, trade-offs, and understanding how systems actually behave once real people are using them.
If I had to point to one area I think about the most right now, it's system design — not because it's the only thing that matters, but because it's where I'm spending the most attention these days.
Today
Right now the focus is building software products, growing TTMCHANGE, building Hayaan, and learning and researching AI seriously — while trying to keep getting better as an engineer, not just busier.
The next 3–5 years
Where I'm aiming, not promising:
- Become a senior software engineer.
- Become known for AI research that actually means something.
- Successfully ship Hayaan.
Principle
Alle talo saaro.
Learning.
Consistency.