About — Ibrahim Chehab

How I got here

I started writing code in 2015 doing small PHP and WordPress sites for local clients — the kind of work that teaches you to ship under constraints. From there I went into agency work at NOVA4, then Dekmak and Cazy Media, building Laravel + Vue apps for clients in Lebanon and the Gulf.

In 2020 I joined Talentech, where I spent five years leading the rebuild of a hybrid Electron desktop platform and managing a small full-stack team. That was where I learned to think in terms of production systems — sync strategies, real-time state, offline-first behavior, and the operational discipline that goes with all of it.

In 2025 I went solo at a healthcare tech company, where I built two production platforms end-to-end: a 714-model Django/DRF pharmaceutical reference data platform and a FastAPI clinical AI coding service. That year taught me what end-to-end ownership actually feels like — schema design at 9am, ETL debugging at noon, ML retrieval tuning at 3pm, deployment scripts at 6pm. It also taught me what the limits of solo work are, and why I want to work on a strong team again.

How I work

Tests aren't optional — even when no one is reviewing.

CI gates catch the bugs human review misses.

Structured logging is cheaper than debugging in production.

Versioned APIs from day one. URL versioning, not headers.

Idempotency everywhere. Re-running a script should never break anything.

"Why" comments outlive the code; "what" comments rot.

Ship a vertical slice before improving the foundation.

Tools & inputs

Reading: Books, RFCs, Postgres internals, post-mortems
Watching: Conference talks (StrangeLoop, GOTO), database internals deep-dives
Tooling: Neovim + tmux on Linux; VS Code with Vim mode on macOS; pytest + Postman + Docker for dev
Outside work: Coffee. Not on Twitter; lightly on LinkedIn; mostly heads-down on code.