I design, build and ship digital products that feel native in both directions.
Open for side hustle builds
ScrollWhat I do, in both directions
← RTLIn short
I'm a product engineer who takes ideas from a blank file to the App Store. Seven years of frontend work at MENA scale taught me one thing: Arabic is not a translation layer. It's a first language, and products should feel native in it.
Selected work (05)
Five products I designed, built and launched on my own: three iPhone and Mac apps, a web app and a developer API.
01 / 05 Focus & app blocker
iOS asks nicely. Orbin doesn’t.
A native focus app for iPhone. Pick the apps that eat your day, start a session, and decide how hard it is to quit: Gentle, Committed or Locked. Built on Apple’s Screen Time APIs, with no account and nothing leaving the phone.
02 / 05 Disk analyzer & system monitor
Your whole Mac, measured in seconds.
A native Mac app that maps storage as a treemap or a 3D landscape, watches CPU, memory, disk and network live, and finds the dev servers you forgot to stop. Fully on-device, bought once.
03 / 05 AI calorie tracker
For sale · open to offers
Track meals, not data entry.
An AI calorie tracker built Middle East first. Snap a photo, say what you ate or scan a barcode, and Metra logs calories and macros, from chicken kabsa to twelve kinds of shawarma. Fasting timers, Apple Health sync, widgets and full Arabic support.
04 / 05 Language learning
Hear it. Type it. Keep it.
Learn English, Spanish and Portuguese by dictation. You hear real sentences, type every word, and a memory model brings each mistake back right before you would forget it. An AI “Explain my mistake” answers in your own language.
05 / 05 Social data API
Public data. Ready to build on.
One API key for public profiles, posts and comments from 26 platforms. Every response comes back in the same JSON shape, every call shows its credit cost up front, and credits never expire. Ships with a typed SDK and an MCP server for AI agents.
About
I'm Ilyas, a senior frontend developer and product engineer based in Lisbon. For more than seven years I've built production interfaces for SaaS and e-commerce teams in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the UK, Australia and Malaysia.
Today I work at Salla, the e-commerce platform behind 67,000+ merchants across MENA. I ship merchant-facing products in Vue, React and TypeScript, and push for real test coverage on the flows that matter.
Outside of that, I build my own products end to end: positioning, design, native and web code, pricing and launch. AI-assisted workflows are part of how I ship every day, not a slide in a deck.
Experience
Senior Frontend Developer
Merchant-facing products, Vue component architecture and Vitest coverage on a platform with 67,000+ merchants.
Makkah, Saudi ArabiaFrontend Developer
New product features in React and Next.js, plus code review and testing.
Dubai, UAEFrontend Developer
Remote frontend development for an Australian digital agency.
Victoria, Australia · RemoteFrontend Engineer
Fintech UI in React, TypeScript and Context API with a consistent visual system.
London, UKFrontend Developer
Owned RTL and localization for the team; multi-theme sites from one Next.js codebase.
Dubai, UAEFrontend Engineer
Gatsby and React features and marketing pages, plus the MasterBusiness School website.
Kuala Lumpur, MalaysiaEducation
Stack
Pick a product and its keys light up. Every key is something I have shipped with, not something I read about.
Product
Interface
Native
Edge & data
AI & quality
42/42 keys lit Everything The whole toolbox
