Artificial Intelligence10 min
AI Chatbot vs AI Agent: What’s the Difference?
AI chatbots can answer your questions. AI agents can take action. Here is the practical difference, explained through everyday examples and real software workflows.
Start Here
If you just found this site, here's the short version.
This is Eng Abdalla's corner of the internet — a software engineer who builds software, writes about the engineering behind it, and uses this site as the place to think in public about both.
Notes on software engineering, system architecture, and building things that last — written by Abdalla, a software engineer working across Africa and the world.
There's no newsletter funnel or growth plan here — just articles, a few projects worth writing up, and an honest record of what's currently being built and learned. Below is where to look first.
01 — Start with the writing
A small, deliberate selection — not just the latest posts — chosen to show the range of what gets covered here.
Software Engineering10 min
Why Hasn't a Somali-Built App Gone Global Yet?
Somalia has talented builders and ambitious ideas. So why do so few Somali-built products reach global markets? The answer is more complicated than a lack of technical skill.
Payments7 min
Somalia Can Move Money Fast. But Can Its Builders Get Paid Globally?
Somalia has made real progress in domestic payments. But for developers and digital businesses building for global customers, international payment access remains a serious infrastructure gap.
02 — Explore what I build
The writing is half the picture. This is the other half — software actually shipped and maintained.
Co-founder & CTO — owns the technical direction of TTMChange end to end and builds its systems from scratch
TTMChange
Scalable ICT solutions built in Somalia for the world. TTMChange designs and ships ERP, university management, and hospital management systems for institutions across East Africa.
03 — What I'm exploring right now
Updated Aug 1, 2026.
- Building
- This site — abdalla.blog.
- Learning
- Going deeper on distributed systems fundamentals — consensus, replication, and the failure modes that only show up at scale — and how much of that theory actually needs to inform day-to-day backend work.
- Exploring
- How AI-assisted engineering changes the shape of a codebase over time, not just the speed of writing it.
04 — How I think about this work
Most of what I write about comes down to the same question asked in different contexts: what does this decision cost someone six months from now, when the reason for it has been forgotten? Simplicity, boring technology, and clear naming aren't style preferences — they're a bet that legible systems fail more gracefully than clever ones.
I'd rather ship something plain that I can reason about under pressure than something impressive that only makes sense while I'm still holding the whole design in my head.