I build.I teach.I mentor.

My father brought the first piece home: a keyboard. Just a keyboard, with no computer to plug it into. Then, almost every month, another part arrived: a mouse, a case, a motherboard. I was in primary school, and every delivery was an event I counted the days to.

I had no idea what a CPU or a hard disk did. It didn't matter. One day the pieces on the shelf became a machine that switched on, and from then on I came straight home from school to it. No manual, no teacher. Just DOS, NC, and a blinking cursor.

I called it playing. It wasn't really play, and it wasn't really study. I lost track of how long I spent in front of that dark screen. To me, it was a whole world.

One day my father came home with a different kind of part: a Windows install disc. Nobody showed me what to do with it. I put it in and installed it myself, first try. The first Windows install of my life. I have done hundreds since.

The machine rebooted into a graphical screen, and the speaker played the startup sound. After all that time in front of a dark, silent command line, the computer talked back.

It lasted a few seconds. I have carried it for decades. Some people remember their first bicycle. I remember a chime through a cheap speaker, and knowing exactly what I wanted to be near for the rest of my life.

A friend of my father's ran a computer shop in my city: he assembled machines, sold parts, fixed what broke. I spent my school summers there, still in my early teens.

On one of my first days, a customer ordered a computer before the owner had arrived. I was alone in the shop, a kid surrounded by the most expensive parts in the room. So I assembled it: motherboard, CPU, RAM, all of it, then installed Windows on top. The owner walked in to find a finished, working machine and asked me one question. How did you do that?

I stayed two summers: assembling computers, installing Windows and software, a real specialty in those days, diagnosing faults, talking customers through their options across the counter. Everyone else my age was on holiday. I was certain I had the best job in the world.

There was a big international computer skills exam called ICDL, and the institute in my city ran months of classes everyone took before it. I skipped the classes and sat the exam directly, still in high school. Highest score they had seen. The certificate came from the international body. The job offer came from the institute.

That summer I stood in front of my first ever class: a small group of adults around computers, and the manager of the institute outside the door, listening. Afterwards she told me she was impressed by how I ran the room. What she had actually watched was my style forming: I never followed a syllabus, mine or anyone else's. I taught what matters. It worked, too: my students' results averaged above the other classes, and my courses became some of the institute's most popular.

I taught there for two years, all while still in high school. One course was the staff of a local bank, adults the age of my father, retraining for their careers. The night before my own final math exam, I was not at home revising. I was in a classroom, teaching.

My first salary went on a Canon A640. A small camera, and the start of a photography habit that never left.

An ad crawled across the bottom of a TV screen: WorldSkills, the world's largest vocational skills competition, sometimes called the skills olympics. I was fifteen. I went to register and found out I had missed the deadline for the 7th national competition. By one day.

So I waited a year, and I did not wait idly. At sixteen I entered the 8th national competition: first in my city, first in my state, then a Medallion for Excellence at the national final. That earned a seat at the national team camp for WorldSkills Calgary 2009, months of training with the country's best, though I was not chosen for the international final.

Three years later, at the 10th national competition, I went first in my city, first in my state, and won the national Silver Medal. Then came another national team camp, this time for WorldSkills London 2011: months of training, and some of the most valuable preparation of my life. I did not get to compete in London. Remember that city, though. It comes back in this story.

So I changed sides of the table. As a WorldSkills expert and judge from 2010 to 2015, I privately trained three competitors, across different years, and every one of them became a national medalist. Then I taught at the national team camps myself, preparing the next generation, including for WorldSkills São Paulo 2015. The kid who missed a deadline by one day ended up building champions.

WorldSkills gave me the operating manual: learn a skill fast, apply it faster, hold it to a professional bar.

On 28 August 2011 I published my first recording: seventeen minutes on building a table of contents in Microsoft Word. It was years ago: the teaching held up, the audio did not. I went on fighting audio quality for years, and it won most rounds. It did not matter. Everyone was making tables of contents by hand for a thesis or a book, page by painful page, and I showed the automatic way. That one video collected 400 comments on my personal website alone.

Then came the boom: a full Excel course packed into a two-hour video in September 2013, C programming that December, then Ubuntu, WordPress, HTML, CSS, PHP, inspect element, and more. Free to download on my personal website, shared across Persian social media, sitting on the first page of Google for years.

The numbers stopped being countable. More than 1.2 million views on one platform alone. Thousands of comments and messages. Other learning platforms republished my videos without asking, which is its own kind of compliment. Somewhere along the way, a generation of Persian speakers learned Office and the web from my voice.

The classrooms kept growing. From a small city in the north, I became an invited lecturer at multiple universities, most consistently at one of the biggest in the country: web technologies, Excel, presenting, sessions that filled six hours of a day, audiences of 200+. Alongside that, eleven years as a part time lecturer across four universities and colleges. More than 2,000 students in total.

One session I never forgot: three hundred people in the hall, six hours on the schedule. At the first break a student walked up and said my voice had felt familiar from the moment I started. She thought about it, then placed it: years earlier, she had learned Word from my videos. She knew my voice long before she knew my face. A country of 80 million, and the person in front of me had already been my student. It happened again over the years. The first time is the one I still feel.

Here is the part I find funny now. There was a photographer at those packed sessions. I never went to collect the photos, and almost a decade later I have no way to reach the organizers. Hundreds of people in a room, six hours of teaching, and not one frame to prove it. If you were there and have a photo, please send it to me. I am completely serious.

Teaching first, titles later.

By 2015 I had a masters place waiting in Germany. That plan was mine alone: every document prepared, every application filed, nobody pushing me but myself. Then a bigger decision arrived. I chose to become an entrepreneur. I co-founded Sarshomar, an investor came in with $1M, and I stayed.

I led Sarshomar as CEO. The flagship product reached one million users in its first month. The team grew to fifteen. Vision, product, payroll, real people counting on me, all of it in my twenties. Two years that taught me more than the masters I had walked away from.

The same year I let Germany go, I enrolled in a masters in IT management at home. Nothing about it was convenient: the university was a two-hour drive away in another city, and I was running Sarshomar as CEO at the same time. I still cleared every class and every exam in that first year.

One night says it all. A nine-hour teaching day had ended late, and my student self had classes early the next morning. Two hours home plus two hours back, at midnight, for a handful of sleep? The math said no. So I slept in my car, like the resourceful optimist I was. The sky answered with the heaviest rain I can remember, drumming the roof until sunrise. Total sleep: zero. That was the first and last night of my car-sleeping career.

The coursework was the easy part. The thesis stalled: months of work at the start, then years of nothing, always behind a company, then a second company, then a move across the world. Late in 2024 I drew the line. In February 2025 I defended, and a decade after enrolling, I finally held my masters in IT management.

In 2019 I went again, co-founding Jibres as CTO. No investor this time. One real customer on day zero, and a platform I wrote line by line, myself. Unbelievable to say in the AI era, but every line.

Jibres became the country's first omnichannel e-commerce platform, and one of its biggest, unifying online and offline selling for more than 1,200 businesses. In 2022 it won a national award at the 14th IR Web Festival.

Sarshomar taught me to carry a vision. Jibres taught me to carry a system, one real customer at a time.

On 26 December 2021 I made the most deliberate decision of my life: to leave, and to build the next stage somewhere better. For me, for my family, for the future my daughters get to grow up in. It was not a gamble. It was future-proofing.

What followed was a year of dismantling one life to start another. I began winding down Jibres, a company more than 1,200 businesses relied on. When the national award arrived a few months into that process, it changed nothing. The decision was made. I prepared the CV, took the interviews, went through the visa, and weighed three cities: Amsterdam, Munich, London. London won my heart. A beautiful, generous city, one of the best places in the world to live, with the weight of Europe's tech scene inside it. And one practical truth: I would rather master one language than juggle two.

Almost exactly a year later, in December 2022, my plane landed at Heathrow. Eleven years after WorldSkills London 2011 went on without me, I landed in London after all. Not for a competition this time. To stay.

I arrived on a Skilled Worker visa with a job offer: an entrepreneur becoming an employee again, a senior software engineer in someone else's company. I landed with a few hundred in my pocket and my family beside me. The deposit for our first home? A friend lent it to me. One asset survived the move intact: what I can do.

I was zero years old in this city, starting from zero. Everything I had built stayed behind. Everything I had learned came with me.

The teenager who learned that helping others win beats winning alone never really left. Since June 2024 I mentor on ADPList, 600+ sessions and counting, on roadmaps, architecture, careers, and the resume, interview, and visa questions underneath them. Most weekends I go from one call to the next, meeting engineers from countries I have never set foot in.

ADPList named me the World's Most Influential Mentor in 2024 and again in 2026, and the number one mentor in Europe, alongside 19 more monthly and quarterly awards, all catalogued on the awards page. I keep the titles in perspective. What I actually chase is the moment something finally clicks for someone.

Competitor to coach, engineer to mentor, builder to team leader.

Two years into the restart I made another deliberate choice. I wanted freedom: my place in this country earned by my own work, tied to no employer. Preparing the evidence took a long time. In September 2024, the UK endorsed me as exceptional talent in technology, under the Global Talent route.

There's no sponsor on that route and no shortcuts. An endorsing body examines your last five years of evidence and decides if you qualify. I applied in the innovation category, as a leader in the industry, with the work to back it, and the answer came back yes.

Two years earlier I had arrived needing a sponsor. Now the UK said: stay, on your own merit. In December 2025, three years after landing, came settled status. This city is home now. I hold this endorsement the closest.

In July 2025 I stepped on stage again, for the first time in English. A new country, a new culture, new rules of the room, layered on top of the same presence built over years of teaching and years of presenting. And I started big: my first talk was at Figma's office, a company I have admired for years, in front of 120+ London engineers.

Walking off that stage I knew: if I can do this, I can do more. There has been at least one talk every quarter since, from Cloudflare to the AI Coding Summit and its 5,000+ engineers, all listed on the talks page. Giving back to the community stopped being a plan and became a habit. Planning a stage of your own? The door is open.

For me the argument ended with an enterprise auth panel: the kind of build that normally owns a quarter of a roadmap. With AI in the loop it shipped in three days, production quality. After that, the question stopped being whether AI belongs in the work.

I believe AI belongs inside the way a team works: in code reviews, in agents, in the definition of done. Not bolted on as a faster keyboard.

In practice that means AI reviewing every pull request, release cycles measured in days instead of months, and architecture shaped deliberately so both people and machines can work on it safely. I use it every day, including weekends. I will not stand on a stage and preach a workflow I do not live.

That is what every talk I give starts from: a working practice, proven in production, not slideware.

Away from the terminal I am a father of two lovely daughters.

Remember the Canon A640 from my first teaching salary? It became a Nikon D5300, which became a Canon EOS R8 with a full studio setup, all listed here. The freshest frames live in my photography corner.

People call tomorrow a mystery. I only half believe them: there is uncertainty, and plans bend, but when you plan and put in the work, tomorrow answers. I have seen it answer.