Built in production.
Self-taught engineer from Algiers. Eight years in production systems — application, server, database, and everything that breaks in between.
Background
My name is Youcef Zemmar. I started in IT at sixteen, with an internship at Météo Algérie — operating-systems, networking, on-site infrastructure. From there I went straight into the work: building, breaking, shipping. No certificate, no waiting.
The years after were spent inside other people's production — e-commerce platforms, fintech back-offices, internal dashboards, real-time systems, and security audits — across multiple regions and time zones. Every stack, every shape of incident. That was the school I actually went to.
In 2025 I started Minacef, then rebuilt it as DZBuild — the company I run today. A small, deliberate team in Algiers, shipping a platform that runs every day for merchants who cannot afford it to be down.
How I work
Full-stack, but PHP is the language I lead with — by choice. I work on Linux daily — Ubuntu, Debian, Kali — and run Windows-Server stacks when the client's world demands it. I'm comfortable in the database the way some engineers are comfortable in their IDE.
I prefer boring infrastructure: battle-tested, multi-region, observable. The right thing fast beats the wrong thing clever, every time. If it can't survive a Friday-night traffic spike, it isn't done.
Specific over abstract. Owned end to end. Boring on purpose.
Team
DZBuild is small and deliberately so — engineers, operators, designers, support, all in Algiers, all owning what they ship. We share an on-call rotation, a single repo, and the same production database. The team is what makes the platform feel inevitable.
Now
Running DZBuild full-time. Heads-down on infrastructure, merchant tooling, and the next twelve months of the roadmap. I'm open to conversations with serious operators — say hello.