Quebec, Canada · remote or relocation · available now
For five years I owned the backend of C-CUBE, the software 1,000+ roofing and construction companies run their business on, from quotes in the office to daily reports from the field. Before that I was the first developer at Rounded. Today I'm building Railyard, a deploy platform written in Rails and Go.
Al Mokhtar Bekkour · Senior Rails & Go engineer
Products I designed, built and run myself.
Deploys your frontend, backend, databases and workers to servers in your own DigitalOcean, Hetzner or Vultr account. A Rails 8 control plane tells a Go agent on each server what to do over gRPC: build the image, run the release, route traffic through Caddy with TLS, stream the logs back, and roll back if the health check fails. Managed Postgres with point-in-time recovery, Redis, a CLI and a Terraform provider.
I built it to watch my own apps and servers. Every app Railyard deploys gets a project with no code change: its container logs come in, stack traces become issues, and slow queries, N+1s, cron jobs, uptime and SSL are tracked. On the servers it scans OS and container packages for CVEs, flags exposed ports, crypto miners and reverse shells, watches sensitive files for changes, catches secrets leaked into logs, and can block an attacking IP across the whole fleet.
A player for the audiobooks you own, built so I'd remember what I listen to. Tap to highlight a moment, add a note, turn it into a flashcard and review it with FSRS spaced repetition. Captions are transcribed on the device, so you can search every word of a book and jump to it. No account, nothing uploaded, in 10 languages.
Swift · SwiftUI · on-device speech
Self-hosted product analytics for SaaS apps: events, funnels, retention, user paths, form drop-off and anomaly alerts. Events sit in monthly Postgres partitions with daily rollups, and the SDKs for Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Node and Go have no dependencies.
Rails 8 · PostgreSQL · Hotwire
Estimating for roofing and renovation jobs, the trade I worked in at C-CUBE. Draw measurements on an uploaded blueprint, pull materials from a catalog, roll up waste, labour, markup and GST/QST, and export a PDF or CSV report. French and English, with fictional demo data.
Vue 3 · TypeScript · Pinia · Fabric.js
Small tools I use every day Garmin prayer-times watch faceMac menu-bar prayer timesMac cleaner
Production Rails since 2017, in construction software, fintech and CRM.
Senior Software Engineer
Joined a seven-year-old Rails and Ember codebase and became its senior owner. C-CUBE runs quoting, invoicing, scheduling and field reports for 1,000+ roofing and construction companies: their estimators, office staff and field crews, with each company in its own Postgres schema. I worked across Chargebee billing, the QuickBooks sync, Nylas email and calendar sync, Elasticsearch search, Shoryuken jobs on SQS and PDF generation, and kept fixing slow queries and pages as accounts grew. It ran as a Rails app plus smaller services on ECS Fargate and Aurora Postgres, including an email service and an image thumbnailer fed by SQS, all defined in AWS CDK.
Rails · Ember · PostgreSQL · Elasticsearch · ECS Fargate · SQS · AWS CDK
First developer
Bookkeeping, invoicing and tax software for Australian sole traders and freelancers. I wrote the first commit and built the Stripe and Stripe Connect payments, the FreshBooks import, the Australian tax tables and settings, and the React Native mobile app.
Rails · React Native · Stripe · Resque · Heroku
Software Engineer
Built ProCRM, a CRM for call-centre teams in Tangier and London: the PostgreSQL schema, the REST APIs and the KPI dashboards managers used.
Rails · Vue · PostgreSQL
Software Engineer
Booking flows, Stripe payments and listing management for an agritourism marketplace in France.
Rails · Nuxt · Stripe
Web Developer
Client websites and CMS deployments for an agency.
PHP · Symfony · Drupal
App Academy (full-stack web) · OFPPT (computer science)
Notes from building Railyard: the bugs, the fixes and the trade-offs.
I'm in Quebec and open to senior backend roles, remote in Canada or with relocation. Email is the fastest way to reach me.
hey [at] almokhtar.dev
