From Damascus to Riyadh: A Syrian Engineer’s Tech Journey
A reflection on identity, displacement, the quiet shape of the Syrian engineering diaspora, and what a career built between two cities has taught me about engineering, belonging, and what it actually means to build software from a place the world isn’t watching
It’s a Tuesday evening in May 2026. I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Riyadh, working on a feature for an app that will ship to users in countries I’ve never visited. The code I’m writing is in Dart. The framework is Flutter. The conversation around me is in three languages — Arabic, English, and snatches of Urdu from a table of engineers two seats over. My laptop is in English. My notes are in Arabic. My WhatsApp messages are in both, depending on who I’m replying to.
This scene is unremarkable in 2026. Tens of thousands of engineers across the Gulf are working in approximately this exact configuration on any given evening. What’s less obvious — what’s almost invisible to anyone who isn’t from this part of the world — is that a meaningful fraction of those engineers, the Syrian ones, are working from a particular kind of distance. The distance between the city we grew up in and the one we’re working from. The distance between an engineering trajectory that was supposed to be one shape and the one it actually became.
This article is about that distance. It’s a personal reflection on what it has meant to build a career in software engineering as a Syrian — first in Damascus, where I started, then across years of displacement, then in Riyadh, where I work now. It’s not a refugee narrative. I’ve read enough of those to know the genre, and the genre tends to flatten the people in it into either victims or symbols of resilience. I want to write something that isn’t either — that simply tries to describe what the journey was, what it taught me, and what it gives to the work I do now.
Some of this will resonate if you’re from the region. Some of it will resonate if you’re from anywhere whose normal life has been interrupted by larger forces. Most of it, I hope, will resonate with anyone who has wondered what it means to build a craft inside circumstances you didn’t choose.
Let’s go.
Damascus, Before
I want to start by saying something that often gets lost in stories about Syrians of my generation: Damascus, for those of us who grew up there, was not just a city. It was an entire infrastructure of normal life that we had no reason to question.
It had universities. Cafés where engineers met to argue about code. Tech meetups, modest by Western standards but real. A small but growing developer community. Internet that worked most of the time. The same low-grade frustrations that anyone learning to code anywhere has — slow tutorials, broken documentation, libraries that didn’t quite do what they claimed. The frustrations were universal. The setting was specifically Damascene — a city that had been continuously inhabited for more than 4,000 years, with all the cultural layering that creates, sitting on top of the present-tense reality of young engineers trying to figure out what kind of careers they wanted to build.
I learned to code there. Not because anyone had told me it was a strategic career move — though it was — but because programming felt like the closest thing to magic I had encountered. Type some words; the screen does something. That feeling never goes away, no matter how many years of engineering follow it.
I want to honor that period of my life because the diaspora narrative tends to skip over it. Damascus was where I became an engineer. The version of me that exists today — typing this in Riyadh, having shipped packages used in dozens of countries, having written a book exhibited at a book fair, having become whatever I’ve become — that version began there. The displacement is real. The origin is also real. Both are true at once.
The Interruption
I’ll be careful about how I describe what came next, because the specifics of any individual Syrian’s experience belong to them, and the version of this story that flattens us into a single arc is the version I want to refuse to write.
What I can say is this: at some point in the past decade, the assumptions that had organized my life — and the life of my generation — stopped working. The career trajectory I had been building toward in Damascus became inaccessible by routes that were available to engineers in other countries. The choice that confronts engineers of my generation is one I haven’t seen described well in tech career writing: when the path you’ve been building toward is interrupted by forces outside your control, what do you do with the skills you’ve already built?
The answer, for many of us, was that engineering became the most portable thing we had. A laptop. An internet connection, when we could find a reliable one. A working knowledge of a programming language. These were not enough to replace what was lost. But they were enough to keep building something, even when other things were impossible to build.
I think about this often when I read career advice from Western tech writing. Articles about how to “find your passion” or “follow your curiosity” or “build a personal brand” assume a baseline of stability that some of the engineers reading them simply don’t have. The advice isn’t wrong; it’s just incomplete. For a meaningful fraction of the global engineering workforce, the question isn’t “what should I build?” — it’s “how do I keep building anything at all, given the situation I’m in?”
The answer, for many Syrians of my generation, was: you build remotely. You build for clients in other countries. You build open source because open source doesn’t ask where you live. You build a public profile that travels even when you can’t. You learn that the work itself has to carry the weight of the career, because the institutional supports — universities, predictable employers, government stability, regional recognition — that other engineers take for granted aren’t yours to rely on.
This is the formative experience that I think shapes Syrian engineers of my generation in a way that’s hard to articulate to engineers who haven’t lived through it. The work has to stand on its own, because nothing else is going to carry it.
Why Engineering Specifically
I want to address something that gets asked of me sometimes: why engineering? Why software specifically? Wasn’t that an unusual choice given the circumstances?
The honest answer is that it was the opposite of unusual. For young Syrians of my generation, software engineering became one of the most rational paths available, for reasons that were mostly practical:
It was portable. A doctor needs a license that doesn’t transfer across borders. A lawyer needs the local legal system. A teacher needs the local educational structure. A software engineer needs a laptop and an internet connection. The portability isn’t just convenient; it was sometimes the difference between having a career and not having one.
It was meritocratic in a specific way. Open source contribution doesn’t ask where you went to school. A Stack Overflow answer is good or it isn’t. A pull request gets merged or rejected based on its quality. These were domains where the credentialing systems that excluded us were less relevant than what we could actually do.
It scaled with the network you could build remotely. A regional reputation depended on institutions that weren’t always functional. A global reputation depended on whether you showed up consistently in places where engineers from anywhere could see you. The internet didn’t care about our passports.
It paid in currencies that worked. When local economies became unstable, the ability to earn in dollars or euros from clients in stable economies was sometimes essential. Software was one of the rare skills where this was possible at scale.
I’m naming these reasons explicitly because the romantic version of “I chose software because I loved code” obscures the practical decisions that many of us actually made. Some of us did love code. We also chose it because it was one of the few things we could do that would actually let us build a career in the conditions we were in. Both things are true. The romantic story isn’t more true than the practical one.
Building from Elsewhere
The years between leaving Damascus and arriving in Riyadh were the years I spent figuring out what engineering looked like when you couldn’t take any infrastructure for granted.
Some of what I learned during those years became foundational to the engineer I am now:
You build in public from day one. Not as a marketing strategy. As a survival strategy. The work I produced needed to be visible to clients, collaborators, and future employers who would never meet me in person. Articles on Medium. Code on GitHub. Answers on Stack Overflow. Presence in Discord servers and Twitter Spaces. The public trail was the resume. Engineers who relied on private credentials and local references didn’t have a way to translate those into opportunities that crossed borders. Engineers who built publicly did.
You contribute to communities you can’t physically be in. I attended Flutter conferences I couldn’t travel to by watching the recordings, taking notes, and writing follow-up articles that engaged with the content. I participated in Twitter Spaces with engineers in time zones I had to do math to align with. I sent pull requests to packages whose maintainers I’d never spoken to except through GitHub. The community was wherever I could log in to. That orientation shaped how I think about community building now — distributed-first, asynchronous-default, judged by the contribution rather than the physical presence.
You learn to write English at the level of a craftsman. Not just functional English — good English, careful English, the kind that signals intellectual seriousness to readers who can’t tell where you’re from. For Syrian engineers of my generation, English became a second native language in a way it isn’t for engineers from countries that don’t need it as urgently. The articles I’ve published in English are, in some sense, the artifacts of years of deliberate practice in someone else’s language. The work shows.
Get Mouaz M. Al-Shahmeh’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
You build assets that travel. Packages on pub.dev. Open-source contributions. Articles that exist independently of any single employer. A book. These were the things that worked when other things didn’t. The instinct to build durable, portable, public assets has shaped how I think about my career permanently. I’d recommend it to any engineer — but I learned it the hard way.
Arriving in Riyadh
I arrived in Riyadh into a city that was rapidly becoming something different from what it had been before.
The Saudi Arabia of the late 2010s and early 2020s went through an aggressive technological transformation that the outside world only partially understood. Vision 2030 wasn’t just a policy document. It was a deliberate national pivot toward technology, infrastructure investment, and the kind of soft power that comes from hosting major international tech events. LEAP, which started in 2022, has become one of the largest tech conferences in the world. The Saudi tech sector, which had been niche, became a real ecosystem.
For Syrian engineers — and Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Yemeni, and broader regional engineers — Saudi Arabia became one of the natural professional destinations. The combination of demand for tech talent, language and cultural proximity, time zone advantages for working with both European and Asian clients, and a government actively investing in becoming a regional tech hub made it logical for many of us to converge here.
What Riyadh actually became, by the mid-2020s, is a kind of regional tech crossroads that the Western tech press rarely describes accurately. It’s not Silicon Valley. It’s not trying to be. It’s something different — a place where engineers from across the broader Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa overlap in ways that produce a distinctive engineering culture. A mid-sized fintech here might have engineers from twelve countries on a single team. The product gets built in English; the standup is in English; the WhatsApp group switches between three or four languages depending on who’s online.
The version of Riyadh that I work in is, in some ways, the version of any major regional tech hub in 2026 — globalized, multilingual, productive. The specifics matter, though. There’s a particular feeling to building software here that’s distinct from building it in Cairo or Dubai or Istanbul or any of the other regional centers. I won’t try to articulate it fully. I’ll just say that the work I’ve done in the past few years — the packages, the articles, the book, the community contributions, the engineers I’ve mentored — all of it has been done from this specific city, in this specific configuration of regional engineering culture. The city isn’t incidental to the work. It’s part of what makes the work possible.
The Syrian Engineering Diaspora Nobody Counts
There’s something specific I want to articulate about the Syrian engineering diaspora in 2026 that I haven’t seen written about anywhere else: we are everywhere in regional tech, and we are mostly invisible.
Syrian engineers are working at major regional super-apps. We’re maintaining open source packages used by hundreds of thousands of developers. We’re publishing on Medium and Dev.to and Stack Overflow. We’re building products in Dubai and Riyadh and Istanbul and Amman and Cairo. We’re in remote roles for European and American companies. We’re founding startups. We’re being acquired into other startups. We’re, in some cases, being recruited into senior positions at companies that have no idea about the path that brought us there.
Most of this contribution is invisible to the people consuming it. A user of a Saudi fintech app doesn’t know how many Syrians built it. A reader of a Flutter tutorial doesn’t necessarily know where the author lives or where they’re from. The contribution is real; the visibility is selective.
I don’t say this to claim credit. I say it because I think it’s part of an honest story about regional tech in 2026 that the marketing version doesn’t include. The Gulf’s tech transformation has been partly built on the shoulders of engineers from countries whose own institutions couldn’t fully support them. That’s not a complaint; it’s the reality. We came here because there was work to do and the work was meaningful. The work has shaped both us and the places we work from.
There are Egyptian engineers building Saudi super-apps. Jordanian engineers running Dubai engineering teams. Lebanese engineers maintaining packages used by Turkish startups. Yemeni engineers leading mobile teams at fintechs in Bahrain. Palestinian engineers shipping infrastructure for the entire region. The diaspora is woven into the fabric of how the Gulf’s tech economy actually functions. None of this is in the conference talks.
I write about this partly because I want the story to exist. Engineers reading this in the future — Syrian or otherwise — should know that there was a generation of us, and that we built things. Some of those things will outlast us. They certainly outlasted some of the institutions that didn’t make space for us.
What This Perspective Brings to the Work
Now the harder question: what does any of this have to do with the engineering work I actually do?
The honest answer is more than I would have expected, and in ways I didn’t predict.
A bias toward portable, durable craft. I don’t trust institutions to carry my career. I trust the things I’ve built. Every package I maintain, every article I write, every conference I speak at — these are durable in ways that institutional positions aren’t. Engineers from stable institutional environments often invest in their position within those institutions; engineers from unstable environments often invest in things that travel. The instinct serves me well even now that my situation is more stable.
A patience with long arcs. The career compounding I’ve experienced has played out across years, not quarters. The reading list that shaped me. The packages that took years to find their audience. The book that took eighteen months to write and three years to fully demonstrate its value. The community relationships that matured slowly. Engineers from cultures with short feedback loops sometimes struggle with long arcs. Engineers from interrupted trajectories often learn patience as a survival skill that translates into a professional advantage.
An assumption that work has to stand on its own merit. I came up in environments where credentialing was selective, networks were unreliable, and the only thing I could fully count on was whether the work itself was good. The instinct to write code that holds up to scrutiny, to ship documentation that respects the reader, to produce artifacts that don’t need me to be in the room to defend them — these are habits I built because I had to. They turned out to be habits that serve seniors well anywhere.
A genuine multilingual technical fluency. I produce content in English. I produce content in Arabic. I think in both, sometimes within a single technical conversation. The Flutter community is global, and the engineers I work with most closely span dozens of nationalities. Being able to communicate across linguistic boundaries fluently isn’t a soft skill in my work. It’s load-bearing.
A grounded humility about institutions and recognition. I’ve been recognized by Google (the Developer Library), invited to speak at events, asked to mentor, and otherwise treated as a senior practitioner in the global Flutter community. I’m grateful for all of it. I also know that recognition is partly a function of timing, geography, and luck — that there are engineers across the region whose work is at least as strong as mine who haven’t received it, often because they don’t operate in the channels where recognition gets distributed. Holding both the gratitude and the awareness has shaped how I try to write, mentor, and contribute. I try to make the channels more accessible to others while honestly engaging in them myself.
The 2024 Question
I want to address something carefully because it’s the most personally weighty part of any contemporary Syrian writer’s life: the political situation in Syria changed dramatically in late 2024 and the years following. The country that some of us left is not the country that exists today. The questions of whether to return, when to return, what return would even mean — these are live questions for an entire generation of Syrian diaspora, and they will be for years.
I don’t want to write about my own answer to that question publicly. It’s not the right place. What I’ll say instead is this: regardless of where individual Syrian engineers end up in the next decade, the years of work we’ve put into building careers from elsewhere have already shaped who we are. The skills we built, the communities we joined, the public artifacts we created, the engineering identities we developed — these came with us, and they will go with us wherever we go next.
The diaspora period of Syrian tech, if it ends or transforms, will have produced engineers who are uniquely globally networked, uniquely portable in their skills, uniquely accustomed to building software for users they will never meet. That generation includes me. It includes engineers across this region whose names you may not know but whose code you may have used.
Whatever comes next — for Syria, for the Syrian diaspora, for any of us individually — the work we’ve built persists. That’s the part that doesn’t depend on geography.
A Closing Word
I want to close on something I’ve been thinking about as I wrote this article: the question of identity that isn’t binary.
When people ask where I’m from, I usually say Damascus. When they ask where I’m based, I say Riyadh. When they ask what I work on, I say Flutter and open source. None of these answers is more true than the others. The answer that’s actually accurate is that I’m shaped by all of these — the city of origin, the city of current life, the craft that traveled with me through both, the regional engineering community that has become as much my professional home as any specific employer.
For engineers reading this who are themselves between places — geographically, professionally, in any sense — I want to leave you with the most useful thing I’ve learned: your work is part of who you are, and it’s portable across all the changes that aren’t. Invest in things that travel. Build assets that exist independently of any single context. Make your contribution visible in channels that aren’t tied to any specific institution. Choose collaborators in communities that span borders.
For engineers from stable contexts who read this and want to understand engineers from interrupted ones — thank you for reading this far. The thing that helps most isn’t sympathy. It’s treating us as peers and judging the work on its merits. Most of us are doing the same with you. The international Flutter community at its best is a community of engineers across many contexts who treat each other as colleagues. That’s the version I want to keep contributing to.
For Syrian engineers reading this in any country — keep going. The work compounds. The journey isn’t linear, and the destination isn’t always the city you started in, but the engineer you’re becoming is real, and the contribution you’re making is real, and someday someone you’ll never meet will use code you wrote from a place you might not even be living in anymore. That’s the strange continuity that craft provides. It’s not nothing. For many of us, it’s been almost everything.
Damascus, Riyadh, and wherever comes next — all the same work, all the same engineer, all the same long arc. I’m grateful for the journey so far. I’m curious about what comes next.
If this resonated, you can find my technical work, packages, articles, and speaking history at malshahmeh.web.app. For engineers from any displaced or distributed context who want to connect, I’m responsive on most platforms — the cross-context engineering conversation is one I genuinely value.
If you’re a Syrian engineer reading this and want to share your own journey in the comments, please do. The collective version of this article, told across many of our voices, is more valuable than my version alone — and the historical record of who we were and what we built deserves to exist somewhere public.
