A long-form story about how robotics, web work, Linux, teaching, and startup thinking all connected

Long before I was thinking seriously about infrastructure, I was spending time around robotics, competitions, and hands-on building. I genuinely loved staying after school to wire sensors, motors, and controllers, or to debug code on a robot until it finally behaved the way it was supposed to. That environment taught me something very important very early: engineering is not about writing a beautiful idea on paper; it is about making a stubborn thing actually work.

I competed in events like FIRA Cup and STEAM Cup, and I won first place in an educational robotics Olympiad while also earning third place in the Soccer Player Hamster League at STEAM Cup Iran 2018. Those competitions were not only fun memories. They trained a mindset in me: break a problem into smaller parts, test each part, stay calm when something fails, and keep moving under pressure. Competitions can be brutal, but that brutality is useful. It forces you to stop pretending and actually solve the problem.

Looking back, robotics was probably my first real exposure to systems thinking. Hardware and software had to meet in the middle. Timing mattered. Reliability mattered. The environment did not care whether my explanation sounded clever; it only cared whether the robot could do the job. That lesson stayed with me and later showed up again in servers, deployments, and production systems.

This is why I never want the robotics part of my story to disappear. It was not some random childhood side note. It was one of the first places where I learned how engineering pressure feels, how debugging really feels, and how satisfying it is when many moving pieces finally behave like one system.

After that stage, I moved deeper into web development. At first, like many people, I experimented with website builders. But then I became more serious. I worked with WordPress, completed a formal 40-hour training course and scored 100/100, started coding in PHP, and later moved toward Node.js and Next.js for more modern stacks.

The important part is not the list of technologies by itself. The important part is what real-world web work forced me to face. Once you build for actual businesses, you cannot stay inside the comfortable fantasy that web development is only about pages and components. Suddenly you are dealing with slow websites, broken plugins, SEO concerns, caching problems, downtime, customer flows, operational mistakes, and the strange behavior that only appears when a system is used by real people and tied to real money.

That stage made me much less romantic about software in a good way. I learned that so many critical parts of engineering are boring on the surface but deeply important in reality. Performance, deployment, structure, monitoring, recovery, permissions, backups, stability, and security are not glamorous until the day they save the whole project.

In other words, the path from websites to operations was not accidental. Real web work naturally pushed me there. Once you care about the full product instead of only the code you personally wrote, DevOps starts to feel less like a separate specialty and more like an inevitable next step.

I truly and deeply love helping students. Many students are under enormous pressure and a lot of them are genuinely struggling. The educational system in Iran is not healthy, and students are constantly affected by political tension, war, social pressure, instability, and many other things around them. I do not help students to show off or to add another line to a resume. I do it because it honestly makes me feel better, and in this period of my life it is one of the few things that makes me truly happy.

I am writing this part of the website with a simple hope: maybe more people will decide to help too. At the beginning, my dream was to build a startup that could genuinely help students. I actually started one. We built a platform for students in Iran where they could publish articles, sell their products, and discover their interests in one place. The idea won several awards, including first place in the SDGs SAGE competition for SDG4 and strong recognition in competitions like Ibn Sina, but unfortunately there was never real support to continue the work in a serious way.

Later I moved more toward teaching itself. I have taught in different places, but one place people may recognize is Allameh Helli 6, one of the well-known schools in Tehran and part of the SAMPAD system for gifted students. In my opinion the environment there is extremely intense. The academic pressure is very high and the whole atmosphere revolves around studying and competition. Even so, I was happy that I could share something meaningful with the students.

During one of my sessions there, I talked about Alan Turing and the early history of computers, and also Steve Jobs and the development of personal computing. The students were engaged, curious, and happy during the talk, and that made the whole experience meaningful for me. I have also tried to help in communities such as TeenoStars, where students get the chance to present their startups at ELECOMP, the largest technology exhibition in Iran. I want to continue this path and I would also love to write more about these experiences in the Blog section of this website.

What can I say — one hand alone cannot make a sound. I have met some amazing people along the way, and I try to help a little wherever I can. I still believe educational and student-centered work matters deeply. Hopefully, toward a happier future :)