/ about
I build the backend, and I ship the product on top.
I'm Al Mokhtar Bekkour — a senior software engineer based in Quebec, Canada. For the better part of a decade I've built and scaled multi-tenant SaaS in Ruby on Rails, reaching for Go when the performance-critical parts demand it. Billing, scheduling, document generation, financial integrations, and the Postgres and AWS underneath — I'm comfortable owning a feature from the database it lives in to the infrastructure it runs on.
I came up the long way — trained through OFPPT and App Academy, then years of shipping real production systems for real companies across fintech, construction tech, and call-center CRM. I work in English and I'm learning French. Most of what I know, I learned by maintaining software other people wrote and being on the hook when it broke.
How I work
I'd rather ship something boring that works than something clever I have to babysit. New tools have to earn their place — I've maintained enough of other people's excitement. Legacy code isn't the enemy; it's running the business, usually for reasons that aren't obvious from reading it once. So I read it before I change it, and I change as little as I can get away with.
The goal I'm always aiming at: a system the next person can understand without me in the room. Idempotent where money is involved, indexed for how the data is actually read, observable when it moves. Fewer moving parts than the problem seems to need.
What I'm building now
On the side, I ship my own products end to end.
Constat
In progressA B2B bug-capture tool — one link records a customer's screen, console and network so support can replay the exact repro. Rails 8, a Go service streaming uploads over WebSockets, a TypeScript recorder.
Railyard
In progressA one-click deploy platform for Rails apps on your own servers — a Rails control plane driving Go agents over gRPC, with Docker builds and deploy logs streaming live.
Recall
iOS live · web in progressAn offline-first audiobook study app, shipped solo to the App Store — highlight a passage mid-playback, note against it, review a whole book from one library. Swift, SwiftUI, on-device, localized into 10 languages.
Work with me
I'm open to full-time, contract, or advisory work — remote in Canada, or open to relocation. I'm most useful on:
- → Rails & Go backends for multi-tenant SaaS
- → Financial integrations (Stripe, QuickBooks, bank feeds)
- → PostgreSQL performance & query tuning
- → Untangling and rescuing messy legacy code
I also write about the systems I build — the honest parts included. Read the blog → And here's where I'm taking my craft next → or what I'm reading →