about
A short account of the person behind the byline — where I am, what I am responsible for, and the three rules that decide most of the arguments before they start.
I am Sakib Bin Kamal, an engineer in Barcelona and one of two founders at Dooplin Apps S.L. The company is bootstrapped and has no outside investors, which is less a virtue than a structure: there is nobody upstream who can require us to monetise the people who use our software.
My half of the company is product and engineering. The masthead puts it plainly: designs, plans, and builds the products — the architecture, the code, and the decisions about what each tool is allowed to do with your data. My co-founder, Zonaet Haque, runs everything that keeps the company standing — the finance, the administration, the obligations of a Spanish S.L.
The through-line is narrow enough for one sentence: I work on systems that hold other people's information, and I am mostly interested in how little of it they can get away with holding. What I publish is the same question turned on somebody else's systems — which, conveniently, is where it tends to get an honest answer.
how I work
Least data
The cheapest record to protect is the one you never kept. I would rather ship a feature that cannot answer a question than a database that can. Where a thing can run on someone's own device, it runs there.
Design first
Architecture is the part of the job that is hardest to undo, so it gets the most thought and the plainest writing-down. I would rather be slow at the design and fast at the code than the other way round.
Checkable claims
A claim that cannot be checked is marketing. Every data claim behind the products is stated as a mechanism, one that has not been confirmed stays off the page until it is, published research is never quietly withdrawn, and the security contact is a file anyone can read.
limits
elsewhere
The fastest way to reach me is mail, and it reaches a person.
sakib@sakibbinkamal.com