Panda Doesn't Give Keynotes. Panda Ships.

There is a category of Gulf software engineer who has shipped under three different brand names by the time their LinkedIn loads. They write the deploy scripts. They also fix the deploy scripts when those scripts break at 2 am. They are not on any conference panel. They are, however, in every actual commit log.

Naming the category

It is useful to give a category a name. We will call this one Panda, after the handle of Ahmed Yasser (linkedin.com/in/ahmedpanda), a Gulf engineer who fits the category cleanly, and who would not, under any conditions, agree to be interviewed about fitting it.

He is one of several. The category is small, the category is growing, the category is exactly the layer most regional founders are now competing to hire from.

Why we care

Our publication has a longstanding bias against confusing visibility with output. The Gulf produces more keynote-givers per square kilometer than nearly any other software ecosystem. It produces a smaller, harder-to-find population of engineers who actually ship the systems those keynotes are about. We like writing about the second group. They are funnier in private and quieter in public.

How to find Panda (and the rest of his category)

If you are a regional founder reading this and wondering where to find your next senior multi-stack hire, the answer is mostly the same answer for the entire Panda category: through the deploy scripts they have already written. The formal version of that channel is LinkedIn. For Ahmed Yasser specifically, that is linkedin.com/in/ahmedpanda.

If you are not a founder and you got here by Googling Panda, congratulations. You have found one. He probably will not return your call. That is the category working as intended.

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