I'm Ibrahim, a software engineer based in Bethesda, Maryland. I currently work as a product owner at tilli software, where I've built out our consumer-facing products and own the company's overall product strategy. My team is also responsible for investigating new tech, solving weird problems, and building internal tooling to connect our different applications and teams.
What sparks joy
I'm a creator/tinkerer at heart. After reading "An app can be a home-cooked meal", creating for others has become my driving ethos.
A lot of the content on this website reflects my different hobbies and interests. A few below:
- Exploring new (and old) tech and arcane systems
- (and food in general)
- Hacking on my
- Gamedev
How we got here
I've been programming since my dad downloaded NetBeans on the family desktop computer; the first program I "wrote" was a hack of the Greenfoot wombat scenario. I gave those wombats access to meteor, hyper beam, and hydro pump, and then let them go wild. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to recreate that thrill since.
Viewify
My first official job as a developer was building a large-ish Angular 5 PWA + PHP (Yii2) backend. That experience involved wearing , and it made me understand what it meant to own an entire software stack. It was also my first time building an actual "product," as opposed to just hobby software or weekend projects; I learned a lot (the hard way) about what it takes to build something that people can actually use reliably and enjoyably.
MaxRewards
From there I went on to MaxRewards, where I helped build and maintain a large app and Node.js backend.
Most importantly, I got a feel for "hacking" in a garage-mode setting: COVID hit the US in full force just a few months into the job, and it completely derailed our plans to raise a seed round (VCs were reasonably spooked by the potential end of society). During this time, we had to use the skills we developed to build our internal bank connectors (reverse-engineering, scraping, dealing with C&Ds from Chase) to and pay rent. Duking it out with all of those circumstances, launching our V2 product, and ultimately raising a successful seed round was probably the most formative experience of my career.
Studio HMR
As appreciative as I am today of all that I had learned and experienced at MaxRewards, I burned out pretty hard and needed a change. I created Studio HMR as a space for me to start exploring my own product ideas and to hopefully soft-launch some gamedev projects that I had been discussing with friends and former colleagues. We still haven't gotten around to actually yet, but hey, I have a lot of cool concept art now.
tilli software
YOU (WE?) ARE HERE.
About this website
I enjoy building things, both in real life and in the digital realm. This website is my personal blog and playground for experimenting with different web tech and design ideas. You'll see a mix of technical posts, ramblings, rants, reviews, and (sometimes bizarre) demos.
Thanks for stopping by!
Signed,
Ibrahim Saberi