( THE ARC · 5 CHAPTERS · 1997 → NOW )
From repairing machines to building intelligent systems.
Five chapters, in order. A soldering iron at ten. A repair shop with his brother at nineteen. A business built online. A loss that took everything. And the software he builds now. Two of them are still running today. Each chapter builds itself as you scroll, and comes apart again if you scroll back.
- SPAN
- 29 YEARS
- CHAPTERS
- 5, IN ORDER
- STILL RUNNING
- 2 OF 5
( 01 / HARDWARE )
1997 — 2006
PC Evolution
He was ten when he picked up his first soldering iron. It was too big for his hand, and there was almost nothing to learn from. Back then nine people out of ten around him had never switched a computer on, let alone opened one. He taught himself anyway, one broken machine at a time, until 2006, when a real shop made him choose.
- Ten years old, teaching himself. No mentor. No course. Just broken machines and one question: why.
- He was selling at the same age. The souq, the open market, from 1997 to 2003.
- At thirteen the internet finally got cheap enough to reach. He learned from Google and from forums in English, Chinese, Russian and Indian, translating every word by hand. Some single words took him six months to understand.
- He found the faults, replaced the parts, and from 2001 he was building custom machines. Installs, upgrades, viruses cleaned off, lost files brought back.
- He learned the creative software of the day too. Photoshop. Ulead PhotoImpact. Ulead VideoStudio. 3D Studio Max.
- Consoles, 1999 to 2006. PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, Sega. He soldered the boards, fixed the controllers and the video connectors, bought broken machines cheap and sold them working. Cartridges and discs as well.
- Phones from 2001, loading ringtones and photos onto 3310s, Sagems and Siemens. And at night, burning music and film discs and selling them shop to shop across the city on foot. Some nights he slept less than six hours.
- In 2006 he opened a real repair shop with his big brother, and dropped everything else. It all took too much time, and the phone work was going too well to need it.
( 02 / HARDWARE )
2006 — 2018
Mobile Era
In 2006 he opened a real shop with his big brother and went all in on phones. Firmware, hardware, unlocking. It kept growing until people were sending him work from across the country, and from Europe.
- Flashing firmware, unlocking, fixing hardware and software. Feature phones first, then iPhones and Android.
- His name travelled. Customers came from wilayas all over the country, and Algerians living in Europe sent duffel bags of phones home for him to fix.
- Phones outsold everything else he ever sold. More than the consoles, the cartridges and the discs put together. The most-sold thing of his life.
- In 2011 he studied Software as a Service through UC Berkeley on EdX, then spent six months on JavaScript. He stopped because the shop had grown too big for two hands, not because he couldn’t do it.
( 03 / BUSINESS )
2019 — PRESENTSTILL RUNNING
E-commerce & Digital Services
He closed the shop in 2018 and spent a year not knowing what came next, reading about modern business until something made sense. In 2019 it did: an international business selling digital products for gamers, run entirely by him. Which means he has already sat in the seat his clients sit in.
- The business started in 2019. Digital products for gamers, sold internationally. He handled the orders, the delivery, the payments and the fulfilment himself, at volume.
- In 2020 he learned digital marketing and used it to grow. Before long his name meant something in gaming circles.
- He owned and ran the communities too. Close to 100,000 members between them, most of them in the United States, with him as the admin people trusted.
- More than 5,000 sales came through those groups. Thousands of real reviews sit on them, earned one at a time.
( 04 / SYSTEMS )
2023 — 2025
Trading
In 2023 he went looking for a real income business, and found trading. Crypto, meme coins, gold, stocks, copy trading. He studied the blockchain itself as well, reading it on-chain to see where the big money was moving before anyone else noticed. It went well for a while. Then it went badly, and he lost everything he had put in. He said so plainly and kept learning. He stopped trading crypto for good in June 2025.
- He traded crypto, meme coins, gold and stocks as a business. It made money first. Then a loss took all of it.
- He admitted it. Most people go looking for something else to blame instead, and because they never admit it, they never fix it either. You cannot correct what you won’t claim.
- The trading tools that actually worked cost more than an ordinary person could pay. Only the rich could afford the good ones. He noticed that, and it stayed with him.
- He put language models to real work — Ollama, LM Studio, vMLX — reading gold and crypto strategies across different timeframes and turning them into plain-language signals with the reasoning attached.
- June 2025. He stopped trading crypto for good.
( 05 / SYSTEMS )
2022 — PRESENTSTILL RUNNING
Development
At the end of 2022 he found AI, and it became the mentor he never had. Not for money. Just to understand it. He has not stopped asking it questions since.
- Learning it meant learning everything it touched. Technology, science, maths, physics, life. He had carried questions for years with nobody to ask, so he asked all of them — and it showed him mistakes he had been making without ever knowing they were mistakes.
- From 2024 he built software for himself. Tools he used, not products for anyone else.
- From 8 April to 14 June 2026 he worked at Revolution Conseil, full-time and remote. Hired as a junior with no trial period, senior within weeks, then Head of IT and Development. Some days ran twenty hours. Nobody asked him to work like that; he wanted the job done properly.
- He left a team he didn’t want to leave. He had always wanted a company of his own, and that mattered more. He has been freelance since, and DEV AIO SOFT is releasing soon.
- He designs the whole thing. The idea, the structure, how it works, how it feels to use.
- Then he builds it. Writes it, tests it, fixes it, documents it, ships it.
- Every course, every forum, every mistake, folded into one thing. None of it handed to him.
“I don’t underestimate anything, but if another man can do it, so can I. Even if I don’t catch up, I’m going to try.”His own words, and he has said them since he was a boy.
None of it came from money. None of it came from comfort.
There are real mistakes in every chapter above. He admitted them, fixed them, and kept going. That is the part of the story that actually matters, more than the machines.