The shortest description I can give of myself is this: a living organism of the Software Engineer species, of human, particularly Egyptian 🇪🇬, descent.
I do all sorts of stuff for all sorts of reasons, but the most significant one is that I'm a student; I don't have entire development teams :)
Primarily, I'm a Full-Stack software engineer and Unity game developer.
My real name is Aaser Abd-el Sabour, but I'm known everywhere online as Proman4713. I am bilingual in English and Arabic, and I like computers, but I sadly have to use different languages to talk to them 🙁
On an Egyptian student budget, my #1 criterion for choosing software technologies is: Is it free?
Utile OS: A minimum-friction Linux desktop.
Yes, a distro… Unlike everything you'll see below, I haven't made many Linux distributions over the years, of course 😅
Utile OS is an open-source Ubuntu-based distribution; it consists of:
- a build pipeline (the main repository mentioned above)
- a Debian archive
- a beautiful serverless website which you'll see later
- a secure full-stack archive management system called Smithy which you'll also see
- beautiful branding and wallpapers and even more projects.
If you haven't guessed already: yes, the 'Utile OS' project is the latest culmination of my ~6-year experience in Computer Science as a whole, across all the fields I've tried, from Cybersecurity to Game Development to UI/UX and brand design to full-stack web and mobile development… And you'll see other things related to it below.
I researched and learned various Linux, GNOME, and Debian concepts; independently investigated and documented processes and tools used to make Ubuntu; modified upstream packages; followed design guidelines to design app icons; and studied open-source code.
For this project, AI serves as nothing more than a glorified search engine; I'm dealing with things way too undocumented for Claude or any other LLM to be able to do alone. Besides, I don't pay for AI, so I have no choice but to do it on my own. I'll write up an AI policy for Utile OS at some point, but just know that since 5 July 2026, almost no AI-written code has been allowed into the repository without a comment mentioning how AI was used (very little).
The best friends I rely on for Ubuntu-based distribution development (because why not befriend technologies?), barring the other parts of the project, are: Node.js; Bash; Figma; and the Arch, Ubuntu, and Red Hat distribution docs. Node.js and Bash are really good ways to write pipelines and tools, and Figma is awesome for designing system wallpapers and UI concepts, as well as app icons (can't afford the Adobe suite 💀).
Smithy: Utile OS's package archive management service.
I've made many web apps and am still making more — open-source ones! I've made them in 'vanilla' web technologies, CRA, and with React Router v7 in serverless environments.
My best friend for web app development now, barring the back-end, is Cloudflare; Workers are awesome free options. I previously used to run on Cloudflare Pages.
This was made in React Router v7 and hosted on Cloudflare Workers with D1 integration; it merges the front- and back-ends in one codebase; it's very early-stage, and I haven't worked on it much yet, but it's the first truly open-source web app of mine (AGPL'd).
Utile OS: Utile OS's brand website.
As for noninteractive websites/homepages, regardless of dynamism, I've made a lot over the past ~6 years. In fact, everything you'll see in this README was made over the past 6 years! I've made them in all the same technologies I use for web apps.
So, my best friend for websites is also Cloudflare for their awesome free plan for Workers and their entire dashboard (not sponsored; I could only wish 😭).
This was made in React Router v7 and hosted on Cloudflare Workers. This website includes some pretty fancy stuff on PC; please check it out 😊
Mawjood API: API service used across Mawjood's web and mobile front-ends.
I've made a lot of APIs over the years, including the one for Smithy, the web app mentioned above, but Mawjood's API was perhaps the most feature-complete and sophisticated one yet, if perhaps not the most elegant since it was one of the first I made.
My best friends for API development are Node.js, Cloudflare, and Firebase; Workers are, again, awesome free options, and Firebase is good when I want a document-based database rather than Cloudflare's SQLite D1 service. I mostly use Node.js for testing only since I can't pay for a VPS 🙂
This (the back-end for Mawjood, not the web app itself) was written on Cloudflare Workers with Wrangler CLI. The back-end database used to be MongoDB Atlas, but due to slower API speeds and the deprecation of the API, I migrated to Firebase Firestore, which has been my favourite document-based database since.
I made Mawjood for schools in my governorate primarily to manage attendance, among other things, so it's closed-source. I've largely stopped maintaining the project since it dragged on for way too long compared to the level of adoption I could get as a middle school student at the time
Mawjood: mobile front-end for Mawjood.
I've admittedly not made a lot of mobile apps, but the one that stands out the most is definitely Mawjood's mobile app, which uses the same API shown above as the web app. It doesn't look particularly great; I hadn't learnt to design pages before developing them at the time. 🤷♂️
My best friend for mobile app development is Expo; the Expo SDK and Application Services (EAS) are absolutely amazing free options that I couldn't have gotten into mobile development without, especially not on my rather ancient hardware at the time.
This app allowed teachers to take attendance, see class students and timetables, and create new classes when their data wasn't available. Teachers could scan QR codes hung outside class doors to immediately get to the class's information. A work-in-progress messaging feature between teachers also existed, but I decided not to move on with its development alongside the rest of Mawjood's system. This app is also closed-source.