About

When I joined the team building the solar-powered server, the person developing the mod disappeared, the technician working on the hardware got busy with his day job, and the new guy (me) was now on his own.

Where have I seen this before?

Oh that's right. When I joined CommnRoom, there was supposedly a team and then there were interns being hired for us, and there was an inherited codebase from some software house in Peru, and then there were none. That's right, Agatha. And then there were none...

Repeatedly finding myself in situations where I have to be the team. I don’t know how people would feel about this, and I don’t remember how I felt about it at the time, but I’ll tell you: what an absolute privilege. In both of these situations I got the chance to take a step back and think about all of it — naturally, since I was responsible for all of it.

With CommnRoom, I got to poke holes. What are the moving parts in the whole, how do things connect, God I really need to bring this back online after this cyberattack at 3.26 AM… and then most importantly, in all that exhaustion when I was questioning my life, questioning why am I doing this? Alongside graduate research and master's coursework... why am I doing this!? Why are we doing this? What the fuck are we building and who needs this?

From those questions, I sat down with my cofounder and we rebuilt it as Zelospace, I took responsibility for the whole, shaped it as it shaped me, and slowly relinquished it to the team I was building. Questions that can only be asked when I own the whole. Questions that took us to startup competitions, conferences, and organic growth after PMF.

When I left Zelospace, I joined SunBlock and look at that, I was in the same position again. Just me, my instinct for low level hardware and software built over a decade, memories of A levels physics, and a sociology professor with a background in cold fusion. That was in 2024.

Since then I have been solo-responsible for designing the whole technical system, revised it four times, and condensed it into a single product, Photon which applies to all solar-powered servers across the globe, making a solar-powered network possible.

Products are designed in a context. A user is part of the product. The environment is part of the product. Products are designed for people. People have needs, wants, pains, and all of these are situated in an environment with other factors.

Photon is designed for someone building an autonomous solar-powered server. Photon is designed to enable these servers to talk to each other. Photon is also designed within a university research setting, leaning on IT infrastructure from the university, but also accounting for stuff like student-churn — people leave after they graduate and knowledge is lost. Without consideration for these a product is poorly designed, positioned to break and be disrupted.

Last year I joined Materializing Design (MD) as the lead engineer/designer. MD is a research group developing a method for design research validation. I've been a part of this group as a student from the beginning, I was the 3rd member in the discord server. And I've seen people practice this method, I've practiced it myself. I find it has too much resistance so I'm designing products that can reduce this resistance.

For me product design is a dance between the path of least resistance, training the user in something new, while providing stable footing for the user's attention/cognition on their "job". People have needs, wants, and jobs, situated in an environment. Tech products become an extension of their users' cognition. I now ask questions to understand these domains, and then I translate these into products.

That is all of my practice.

I am now transitioning to work with small, high-conviction teams building products in the industry, ideally a default-alive startup as a product engineer/designer. If you think about people and products, if you want to convert research to products, or if you want to go for archery in Ottawa, I want to talk. Give me a shout at contact@shahromali.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.