About
I work on the backend of software people pay for.
I'm Al Mokhtar Bekkour, a senior software engineer in Quebec, Canada. I've written production Ruby on Rails since 2017, and Go for Railyard's server agent, CLI and Terraform provider.
From 2021 to 2026 I was the senior engineer on C-CUBE, the multi-tenant SaaS that 1,000+ roofing and construction companies, and their office and field teams, run their business on. I took over a Rails and Ember codebase that was seven years old and worked on billing with Chargebee, the QuickBooks sync, Nylas email and calendar sync, Elasticsearch search, background jobs on SQS, PDF generation, and the slow queries that showed up as accounts grew.
Before that I was the first developer at Rounded, an Australian bookkeeping and tax app for freelancers: Stripe payments, the FreshBooks import, the tax tables and the React Native app.
I trained at OFPPT and App Academy. I work in English and French.
What I'm building now
Railyard
LiveDeploys 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.
Watchtower
LiveI 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.
Recall
On the App StoreA 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.
Work with me
I'm looking for a senior backend role, remote in Canada or with relocation. I'm also open to contract work on Rails apps.
I also write about building Railyard, keep a reading list and a roadmap.