A self portrait taken at home in the middle of an ordinary working day. I’m sitting in front of a black laptop in a black v-neck t-shirt, the screen tilted forward enough that you only see the back of it. Behind me is a traditional salon marocain - a long bench seat dressed with patterned blue-and-white cushions over a beige base - and on the right-hand wall, a flat-screen television. Above the seat, an embroidered cream-and-gold valance runs across the wall, the kind of textile detail you find in almost every family home in Morocco.

I usually split my week between client work, side projects and writing on this site, all of it from this same table. The laptop, a pair of sunglasses and a crumpled piece of paper on the right-hand side are pretty much the full inventory of a normal afternoon: code on the screen, music or a coffee within reach, and the salon doing its usual quiet job in the background. I’m a senior Java EE developer with eleven-plus years of experience on backend architecture and full-stack work in Angular and React, and most of what I build - for clients in Morocco, France and elsewhere in Europe - gets shipped from a setup that looks pretty much exactly like this.

I added this photo to the site because the rest of the portfolio is essentially documents - CVs, project lists, experience pages - and I wanted at least one image of the person actually behind it. If you’ve landed here from the homepage, an experience page or a search result, this is what the other end of the conversation looks like.