Fullstack Developer & IT Manager
Laravel · React · TypeScript · exploring Rust
Leading IT at smartcon GmbH
I'm a Fullstack Developer with 7+ years of experience building web and mobile applications and leading IT teams. I specialize in PHP/Laravel on the backend and React + TypeScript on the frontend, with a strong focus on clean architecture, system integration, and intuitive UI/UX.
- 🏢 IT Manager & Lead Developer at smartcon GmbH
- 🛠️ Building live dashboards, survey platforms, and automated workflows
- 🎨 UI/UX prototyping with Figma
- 🐧 Linux server administration & database optimization
- 🌱 Mentoring developers and investing in engineering culture
- 🦀 Going deep into Rust, systems programming, data-oriented design, and compile-time correctness
Daily drivers
Currently exploring
After 7+ years in web and mobile development, I made a deliberate move into systems programming with Rust, not because web development isn't enough, but because the next generation of technical leaders need to understand what happens beneath the abstraction layers.
| Principle | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| No Magic | Robust software is software you can understand. Every hidden behavior is a future production incident. |
| The Compiler Is Your QA Team | Strict type systems aren't overhead, they're the cheapest QA investment you'll ever make. |
| Boilerplate Is Documentation | Explicit code doesn't need a wiki. Code that describes itself survives 2 AM incidents. |
| Quality Over Velocity | Fast deployment means nothing if it deploys bugs faster. Correctness isn't a feature, it's the foundation. |
| Performance Is a Budget Decision | Every wasted CPU cycle is wasted cloud spend. Performance engineering is cost engineering. |
| Raise the Bar | We don't simplify tools to match the lowest skill level. We raise the skill level to match the right tools. |
Agentic coding is one of the best things to happen to software development, fast prototypes, generated boilerplate, accelerated iteration. I use AI heavily in my daily work and I think that's the right call.
But I hold a clear line: AI should never replace your understanding of system design, or of the code underneath it.
You still have to know what the code means, why a decision was made, and what it implies for the rest of the system. That's how you recognize when the agent is going in the wrong direction and know exactly when to step in. This is the same discipline we've practiced through code reviews for decades, only now, because AI moves so fast, we need to sharpen that skill, not abandon it.
Lose that skill, and you're not engineering anymore, you're just shipping whatever the model produced.
In my view, the sweet spot looks like this:
- AI handles the typing, the boilerplate, the syntax fights, and the repetitive scaffolding, the parts that are overhead, not engineering.
- A strong programming language makes it structurally harder to write bugs in the first place.
- A strict compiler catches the remaining mistakes during development, not in production, and never on the user's side.
When those three align, you get the best of every world: fast iteration, correct code, and a human who still owns the design.
More about my work at alshekh.com