About Karim Mesallam

I'm Karim, a software engineer with more than two decades of experience building things, fixing things, and occasionally taking things apart just to understand why they work.

Software has been a constant throughout most of my life, but I've never been particularly interested in technology for its own sake. What keeps me hooked is the problem-solving: taking something complicated, understanding it deeply, and turning it into something simpler, faster, or better. These days, a lot of my attention is on AI, software engineering, product development, and how the way we build software is changing.

Outside of work, I live in Dahab, Egypt, with my wife and our dachshund. Living by the Red Sea has also made diving a major part of my life. I'm a Divemaster and technical diver, and I approach diving much the same way I approach engineering: understand the system, respect the details, keep learning, and never get complacent.

I tend to go fairly deep into whatever catches my interest. That might mean experimenting with a new AI coding workflow, tuning a Linux setup, researching diving equipment and decompression theory, working on a motorcycle, building some unnecessarily elaborate side project, or spending several hours investigating a question that probably could have survived without an answer.

I'm naturally skeptical of hype, but very optimistic about technology. I like evidence, first principles, good engineering, and people who care about the quality of what they build.

More than anything, I'm curious. I like learning new things, building useful things, and getting progressively better at the things I care about.