Mohamed Aldulaimi — Collected pages
a brief about me, some of the work I’ve done, and field notes on things worth writing down
With JavaScript enabled this site is a book you can leaf through; here is the full text.
About me
My name is Mohamed, and this book is my website. I'm a software engineer who likes building things that feel a little more considered than they strictly need to — which is probably how you ended up holding a book instead of scrolling a feed.
These days I build products at Signit, where documents get signed and promises get kept. Before that, a winding road of projects, prototypes, and the occasional production incident that taught me more than any tutorial ever did.
I keep this book the way some people keep a notebook: a short brief about me, a record of work I'm proud of, and field notes — small essays on whatever seems worth writing down properly.
What am I about? Mostly: caring about the last five percent. The part of the work where the feature already functions, the demo already passed, and the only reason to keep going is that it isn't right yet. I think that last five percent is where all the character lives.
Off the keyboard you'll find me reading — slowly, on paper — which is the quiet joke of this entire website.
(This chapter is starter copy. Rewrite it in src/content/about.md — the book will re-typeset itself.)
Selected work
Every project in this chapter is one I'd happily explain at a whiteboard for an hour. That's the bar for inclusion — not size, not novelty, just whether the problem was real and the solution held up.
Signit — building the product that turns signatures into software: the flows people trust their contracts to, and the machinery underneath that keeps that trust cheap to give. War stories and architecture sketches to follow.
Project two — a placeholder awaiting its story. In the finished book, each entry gets the problem, the approach, the outcome, and one honest sentence about what I'd do differently.
Project three — another placeholder, patiently holding this page open.
(Also starter copy — the real entries go in src/content/work.md.)
Why this website is a book
Websites used to be places. You arrived somewhere, looked around, and left with a sense of who lived there. Somewhere along the way they became streams — endless, edgeless, designed to be exited through the bottom.
A book is the opposite of a stream. It has a cover, which is a door. It has pages, which are rooms. It has an ending, which is a promise that your time was respected. When you close a book you know where you've been, and roughly how much of it there was. No feed has ever told you that.
So this site is bound, not scrolled. You turn its pages. The table of contents is a real table of contents — it is the index of everything here, and every line of it takes you somewhere. The blog posts are field notes, stitched into the spine in the order they were written. When there is nothing left to read, the book simply ends, the way books do.
Is it skeuomorphism? Completely. But skeuomorphism was never the crime — the crime was fake leather on a calculator app. A book metaphor for a thing you read is not a costume. It's the right tool, returned to.
There's also a quieter reason. A page is a unit of attention. When text is poured into pages instead of a bottomless column, the writer has to answer for every one of them: does this page earn the turn to the next? Scrolling never asks that question. Turning does.
Thanks for turning the pages gently.
Turning pages: how this site works
This book has no scrollbar. That is its one inviolable rule: a page is exactly one screen, and anything that doesn't fit flows onto the next page — the way ink has always behaved when it meets the edge of paper.
Here is how the machinery works, for the curious.
The chapters are plain markdown files. When the book opens, each one is rendered to HTML and then handed to a small typesetting engine that does what a compositor used to do by hand: it places blocks of text onto a page of fixed size, one by one, and watches for the moment the page overflows. When a paragraph doesn't fit, it is carried to the next page. When a paragraph is too long even for an empty page, the engine splits it word by word, finds the exact break point, and carries the remainder over — marked as a continuation so it doesn't get a first-line indent it hasn't earned.
The page-turn itself I did not build, and wouldn't try to. It comes from a small library called page-flip, which simulates the fold and shadow of a turning sheet well enough that people instinctively reach for the corners. Good libraries are like good paper: you notice them by not noticing them.
Because pages are typeset live, the book re-binds itself whenever your window changes shape. Rotate a phone, drag a window wider, and the same words are simply poured into differently sized pages, like the same wine in a different glass. The book remembers roughly where you were and opens itself back to that spot.
Everything else is typography doing quiet work: a serif cut for long reading, folios in the footer, running heads at the top, a drop cap where each chapter clears its throat. None of it is decoration. All of it is signage — it tells you where you are in a way no progress bar quite can.
The entire machine is a few small files of JavaScript and one stylesheet. The rest is words.
The last five percent
There's a point in every project where the thing works. The demo passes, the tests are green, everyone is ready to move on. What's left is the last five percent: the empty state nobody designed, the error message written at midnight, the animation that's 80 milliseconds too slow to feel intentional.
The last five percent is invisible in a feature list and unmistakable in the hand. It's the difference between a door that closes and a door that closes well. Users can't name it, but they feel it instantly, and they trust the software more without knowing why.
It is also, minute for minute, the most expensive part of the work — which is exactly why it's rare, and exactly why it's worth doing. Anyone can ship the first ninety-five percent. The last five is where you sign your name.
This book is my attempt to practice what that means: nobody needed the drop caps. That's the point.