In late 2023 my work stopped being “projects” and became products with real users.
A recommender for every bac graduate
Every year, hundreds of thousands of Algerian students get their baccalaureate results and must choose a university program, often with little guidance. From November 2023 to March 2024 I worked as a technical consultant and data scientist with the Algerian Ministry of Higher Education on the Bac Recommender. It is a FastAPI-based platform that recommends programs based on a student’s results and historical admission data.
I pitched it to the Minister of Higher Education, and it was adopted nationwide. It was the first time something I built was used at the scale of a country, and the first time I had to explain a technical system to someone who would decide based on trust, not code.
Around the same time I built SatisUniv, a problem-tracking system for educational institutions, which grew from the same frustration: university processes that were hard for students to navigate.
Gostu
In 2024 I co-founded Gostu, an education startup for baccalaureate students. As co-founder and lead mobile developer I owned the technical strategy and the mobile roadmap, and we shipped an interactive Flutter learning app alongside a web platform with LLM-powered assistance.
An Arabic chatbot at Mobilis
In September–October 2024 I interned as a data scientist at ATM Mobilis, one of Algeria’s mobile operators. I built and deployed an Arabic customer-service chatbot with RASA, which was integrated into the MyMobilis app. Arabic NLP, with its dialects and code-switching, made it clear how much “it works on the benchmark” differs from “it works for customers.”
Competing
Hackathons were where I learned to build under pressure. In 2024 my team placed second at the Yassir Hackathon with an LLM and business-intelligence solution. We also won Google Developers Group DevFest 2024 with a real-time microservices dashboard that included anomaly detection and forecasting.
By the end of 2024 I could build and ship. What I was missing was the other half: understanding the business side of the products I was building. That is the next chapter.