Hi, I’m Albert

I’m Lebanese-Canadian, born in Beirut, and I’ve lived in Canada since 2015. Montreal is home. I’m a writer and software engineer: I write about books, cities, technology, and the private details that make a life legible, and I build tools for understanding code and machines.

What I write

I write about books, cities, technology, and the private details that make a life legible. Some pieces are essays. Some are stories. The useful distinction usually appears after I finish them.

Root and Runtime is where those two practices meet: essays, stories, and software built to make complicated systems more legible.

What I build

Codex AutoresearchBounded software experiments CodeStoryLocal code intelligence; 43% fewer context tokens and 87% fewer tool calls BatCave MonitorA cross-platform, local-first process monitor

Background

I was born in Beirut and moved to Canada in 2015. Montreal is home now. I speak English, French, and Arabic, and I’m happiest in the mountains or in a forest near water. There’s also Tarboosh, my black-and-white Bernedoodle.

I’ve been writing software professionally for over six years. I spent about five of them at Amazon, where I built and operated high-traffic backend systems, including GraphQL infrastructure handling more than 10,000 requests a second. I later worked at Botpress.