Abolfazl Rejali (Ebi)

The question that got me was a simple one. How does the machine actually work? My classmates were learning to use software. I wanted to know what sat underneath it. In high school I stayed late writing programs that did nothing useful at all, just to prove to myself I could make the machine do exactly what I told it to.

I wasn't the kid who liked computers. I was the kid who had to understand them all the way down, and not knowing how something worked would sit in my head for weeks.

University turned into a competition and I went all in. I won several programming championships and finished with the highest academic score my faculty had seen in ten years. The trophies weren't really the point though. They were a side effect of caring about the craft more than was strictly reasonable.

I kept pushing my professors to put me on real projects instead of graded assignments. I was the student who stayed behind after class to ask whether I could help build something, not to ask what would be on the exam. Outside of class I took every Java course and web design workshop I could get into, and squeezed in internships whenever someone would have me.

I joined Apadana Company as a Junior Web Developer, which was a generous title for someone still working out how any of it fit together. I loved it anyway. I built four enterprise web platforms close to from scratch, including role-based access control, booking engines and real-time communication modules.

That job taught me something no course covers. When a bug reaches production and real people run into it, it feels nothing like a failing unit test. There is no undo. That pressure permanently changed how I think about software. Get it right, not just working.

I moved to Hooshmand Sazan Company as a Java Developer. Bigger systems, higher expectations, and senior engineers who were a lot less forgiving. It was exactly what I needed. I arrived knowing how to write code and left knowing how to design systems, and understanding why the design matters more than the code.

Alongside the job I finished my M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Isfahan. Neural networks, machine learning, NLP, probabilistic reasoning. It didn't just add knowledge, it rewired how I think. Once you study ML seriously you stop treating software as a deterministic machine and start designing for uncertainty instead. That shift still shows up in how I approach architecture today.

When I finished, I was offered a place in a PhD program with a full scholarship, tuition and living costs covered. I turned it down. Not because I didn't value research, I genuinely did, but because I had spent enough time watching good ideas stay ideas. I wanted to build things that ran in production, broke at 3am, and had to be fixed before morning.

I have always chased growth. At some point I looked honestly at where I was and knew I needed more. Bigger systems, higher standards, a real step up. I had already decided to move abroad when SMS GmbH in Dresden reached out.

They didn't just offer a job, they sponsored the whole relocation. I arrived, walked into the office, and within a week my probationary contract turned permanent. The team was genuinely surprised by how quickly I could untangle complicated project problems, and that set the tone for everything after.

Over the years at SMS I designed distributed microservice architectures with Spring Boot 3.x, DDD and Clean Architecture. I owned CI/CD end to end across Jenkins, Docker and Kubernetes on Azure, cut system latency through JVM profiling, and introduced practices that actually stuck, including TDD, SonarQube, Testcontainers and structured code reviews.

In 2024 I took on technical leadership for the project at SMS GmbH. It isn't a people management role. It's the job of owning the technical concept and deciding on architecture and direction. Along the way I've also picked up DevOps, mobile and frontend work.

Twelve years in, the tools have changed beyond recognition. What drives me hasn't. It's still the same thing that kept me in the university lab after everyone else had gone home. Understand how it works, then leave it better than you found it.

This blog is part of that. Lessons that cost me time, decisions I would make differently now, and patterns that hold up in production, written down so someone else can skip the expensive part.

After several years in Dresden I moved to Berlin, where I still work remotely for SMS GmbH.

Outside of work I've shipped six small iOS apps to the App Store: Split Bills with Roommate, Stadtrundfahrt, Berlin Heute, Steuerbelege ordnen, Shift Plan Reminder and Habit Builder Ganbaru!. Different stack, different constraints, same instinct to understand something by actually building it.

Berlin is a genuinely great city. Diverse, creative, always something going on. I'm still discovering it and enjoying every bit of that.

This year I started my own business, websitehaus.de, designing websites and building apps for other businesses. After years of building large backend systems for one employer, I wanted to work directly with the people who actually use what I build.

The work is deliberately end to end. Design the site, build it, and ship the mobile app alongside it when a business needs one. The same engineering standards I hold at work, fast, accessible, maintainable and free of unnecessary dependencies, at a scale where one person can own the whole thing.

I run it in my free time alongside my role at SMS GmbH. It keeps me close to the parts of the craft I enjoy most. Talking to real users, deciding quickly, and seeing something go live in weeks instead of quarters.