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Nasr City, Cairo, Egypt · Founding-Engineer Edition
صحيفة
مدينة نصرSuch a lovely font, eh? It's called Ruq'ah and it's a common hand-written arabic style

Hometown paper · covering one Nasr City engineer's exploits abroad · Current stop - München

Vol. VI · No. 07·Circulation · 447·Munich · partly everything·Price: a coffee
The Lead

Came to Munich for the Eisbach. Stayed to lead the platform.

The engineer teams bring in to go from zero to shipped. Marketplaces, government systems, and a paper on legal AI. A continuing report.

Youssef Elkhayat is a software engineer who joins early finds the specific thing worth building, and ships it with the people already in the room. No buzzwords, no heroics, just the work.

9+
Years
25+
Projects
5+
Worldwide employer
It ain't much, but it's honest work.
It ain't much, but it's honest work.

Also in this issue

Markets · Senior Software Engineer

Urbyo, a marketplace for property investors

Buy and sell investment property in one place. Built the buy-and-sell flows on the marketplace team, then stood up the professional-market side.

Problem
Buying an investment property is slow and opaque, and professional investors need a different surface than first-timers.
Built
On the marketplace team, built and sharpened the buy-and-sell flows, then set up the professional market: the listings and tooling for the pro side of the platform, kept separate from the retail path.
Read the full story →
Advisory · Senior Software Consultant

Digitizing the city of Riyadh

Digitizing the city of Riyadh into one automated system, built to strict security and scalability standards.

Problem
Riyadh needed its city operations digitized into a single automated system, with the security and scale a government platform cannot compromise.
Built
As senior software consultant, drove the digitization: an automated system for the city, following the most secure practices and architected to scale from day one.
Moved
20+ Services deployed
Read the full story →
Platform · Team Lead · Mobile

Building the mobile team from zero

Started on the web and backend side. Co-founded the mobile team with a colleague, shipped its first apps, then set the conventions, CI/CD, and hiring bar that everything after ran on.

Problem
WebOps kept winning mobile work and rebuilding each app from scratch, with no shared conventions and no release pipeline to lean on. Every project relearned the same lessons.
Built
Split off from the web team with [George Gendy (G.O.A.T)](https://www.linkedin.com/in/grgmgd) to start the mobile practice. Together with the team, shipped the first three React Native apps by hand, then turned the lessons into a system: shared architecture, a Fastlane and GitHub Actions pipeline for tests, builds, and store releases, and a review bar that made each app faster than the last. Introduced techniques for faster production, software templates, and reusable modules, so the projects coming in ran 5x higher and deliveries kept up. Ran hiring, and led the engineering on the rest.
Moved
Projects coming in
Read the full story →
Independent · Author · Music tooling

Cuerious: how flow-y is your playlist

Scores how well your playlist flows, then reorders it into a set that actually mixes.

Problem
A playlist is a sequence, but every tool treats it as a bag. Spotify tells you what is in it, not whether track seven lands after track six.
Built
Connect Spotify, paste a playlist, get a report. It scores key compatibility, tempo drift and the energy arc across every pair of tracks, then searches for the order with the smoothest transitions. You pick the shape you want, whether that is a build, a plateau or a slow descent. It flags the track that does not belong and says why in plain words, suggests a few that would fit, and writes the new order back to Spotify once you like it. Bring a playlist you already argue with and see what it says.
Read the full story →
Independent · Author · Training & nutrition

Wellpit: a coach that adjusts

Training and nutrition that rewrite themselves when the check-in says they should.

Problem
A plan written on day one is wrong by week three. The honest version has to read what actually happened and change itself. That is the part most plans skip.
Built
Set a goal and a deadline, and it works out the calories and builds the week. Log meals by photo or by pasting a delivery order. Sessions, runs pulled from Strava and weight from a Bluetooth scale all land in the same place. At each check-in it reads the log and comes back with real changes: eat this much more, add a set here, swap that exercise. Your Strava runs tick the matching Hivelab habits too. Come with the goal you keep restarting and let it hold the plan for you.
Read the full story →
After HoursThe B-side. Records, hikes, and the people who were there.Coming soon

A chronology

Latest first · Munich → Cairo

  1. Past — Present
    MiscNow
    More stuff happening
  2. 2025
    From a thesis chasing legal hallucination to a paper at ACL 2025. How it started, how it is going.
  3. 2025 — Present
    BliroNow
    Founding engineer and platform owner. Zero to shipped, on the device.
  4. 2024 — Present
    Senior consultant. Digitizing the city of Riyadh, secure and built to scale.
  5. 2021 — 2024
    Senior engineer on the property marketplace, retail through to the pro market.
  6. 2022 — 2025
    M.Sc. Data Engineering & Analytics. Side quest: a cocktail mixer, powered by a smart socket.
  7. 2024
    Kept the health app steady and raised its engineering bar.
  8. 2018 — 2021
    Team lead. Built the mobile team; 5x the projects coming through.
  9. 2018 — 2022
    The Innovation Studio experienced founders choose to solve problems and scale their business.

Stop Press

Dispatches from real life · filed by the editor-in-chief (and only employee)

BREAKING: CoCoLex teaches legal AI to cite its sources. Hallucinations reportedly furious.
Fig. — the scene of the incident
Breaking

BREAKING: CoCoLex teaches legal AI to cite its sources. Hallucinations reportedly furious.

Early tests suggest the model now checks the source before it speaks, a courtesy the legal profession has requested for some time. Developing story.

Munich · By our correspondent