Tarek Alabd

I started writing mobile apps over twelve years ago — back when the landscape was fragmented, native was the only serious option, and cross-platform was a dirty word. I shipped real products: banking apps, e-commerce platforms, enterprise tools, consumer social apps. The kind of code that has to work at 2 AM when the on-call alert fires.

I led mobile engineering squads — the translation layer between product vision and shipped code. That meant architecture decisions that outlive any one developer, code reviews that raise the whole team's craft, and the occasional hard conversation about technical debt versus delivery pressure.

Flutter caught my attention early. Not because of the hype — I'd survived enough hype cycles to be cynical about new frameworks — but because the underlying model was genuinely different. When Google recognised that work with the GDE title, I decided it was time to make the knowledge more accessible.

Teaching started as a side project. Then one video hit, then a course, then a diploma, then a community of 270K+ developers, then a million students. What it taught me is that the gap between where most developers are and where they want to be isn't talent — it's exposure to the right mental models at the right time.