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Project Rescue
Developer disappeared? Inherited a codebase held together by prayers and cron jobs? I step in, stabilize the build, and get you shipping again — usually in weeks, not quarters.
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Available for Q3 rescues · Dubai / Remote
The Accidental CTO.
I'm Mohammad Ali Akmal. I help founders rescue software, launch products and survive startup chaos — without the cost of hiring a full-time executive.
Bugs welcomeWorks on my machine 🤷 Prod-safePlease don't deploy on Friday. CaffeinatedPowered by caffeine.
About
I never planned to become a CTO.
I kept getting called in. A developer had vanished. A launch was two weeks out. A team was staring at 400,000 lines of code no one had written a comment on since 2019.
I'd step in for “a weekend.” Sometimes I'd stay six months. Over fifteen years and dozens of projects, this accidental thing became my specialty: turning startup chaos into shipping software.
These days I work as a fractional CTO for founders who need someone battle-tested in the room — but don't want to hand out equity to a full-time exec just yet.
01
Diagnose
02
Stabilize
03
Ship
04
Scale
How I help founders
Six ways to unstick your startup.
Every engagement is scoped to the actual problem — not a retainer template. If none of these fit, tell me what's broken and we'll figure it out.
Long-term partner
Fractional CTO
Technology strategy, hiring, architecture and vendor management — senior engineering leadership for founders who need judgment more than they need another headcount.
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0 → 1
Startup MVP
Zero to launch with a stack you can actually maintain. Real production infrastructure, sane defaults, and a codebase your next engineer won't quietly resent.
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Pre-investment
Technical Due Diligence
For VCs, acquirers and founders staring down a term sheet. I audit the code, team and architecture — and translate what I find into plain English for the boardroom.
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Deep-dive
Architecture Reviews
One system, one report. Where it will crack under scale, what to fix first, and what to leave alone. No fluff, no vendor lock-in agenda.
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People + process
Team Scaling
Hiring engineers, setting up rituals, and building a team that ships without you approving every PR. Because you have a company to run.
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Rescue stories
Case files from the trenches.
No portfolios of dashboards. Actual founders, actual disasters, actual outcomes. Names and details available under NDA.
- 01
Case file · 01Pitch Portal
Abandoned codebase → investor-ready in 21 days
- Problem
- Lead developer vanished three weeks before the investor demo. No documentation, no CI, half a payments integration.
- Symptoms
- Silent deploy failures, expired API keys, database migrations run manually via SSH.
- Diagnosis
- Not a code problem — a knowledge problem. Rebuild the operational surface before touching features.
- Treatment
- Rebuilt the build pipeline, containerized services, wrote a real README, hired a mid-level engineer to inherit it.
- Outcome
- Demo shipped on schedule. Round closed. Codebase is still running two years later.
- 02
Case file · 02Property Compliance Platform
Delivered a regulated production platform from scratch
- Problem
- Founder needed a compliance platform for a regulated industry — with real audit trails, real SLAs, and zero appetite for AWS bills that scaled with vibes.
- Symptoms
- Vendor proposals in the six figures, timelines in quarters, no in-house engineering.
- Diagnosis
- Boring stack, small team, tight scope — beat any vendor by 3x on cost and 6 months on time.
- Treatment
- Designed the architecture, built the MVP, hired two engineers, handed it over with playbooks.
- Outcome
- Live, audited, used daily by regulators. Runs on a coffee budget compared to the vendor quotes.
- 03
Case file · 03Fabogo
Former CTO — scaled one of UAE's leading beauty platforms
- Problem
- A fast-growing marketplace with the classic scale-up wall: everything worked in staging, nothing worked in production.
- Symptoms
- Timeouts, race conditions in bookings, an ops team that pinged engineering every 15 minutes.
- Diagnosis
- Architecture debt masquerading as bugs. Bookings needed a real queue, not more retries.
- Treatment
- Re-architected the booking flow, introduced background jobs, rebuilt the on-call rotation.
- Outcome
- Booking failures dropped to near zero. Team stopped firefighting and started shipping features again.
Instead of buzzwords — the receipts
15+
Years building software
Millions
Handled through production systems
Dozens
Projects rescued
100%
Founder-first mindset
Blog · comics · dispatches
Browse the archive The Accidental CTO Chronicles.
A running comic strip about startup chaos, technical debt, and the humans behind the deploys. Every issue: comic, story, lesson, takeaway.
Issue #014
The Scope Creep Monster
Founder mistakes· 6 min read
The Scope Creep Monster
It started as a checkbox. By sprint three, it had eaten the roadmap. A short field guide to spotting scope creep before it eats you.
Read the story
Issue #013
Please Don't Deploy on Friday
Team rituals· 6 min read
Please Don't Deploy on Friday
A love letter to the on-call engineer who inherits your 5pm merge. And a serious argument for release windows that actually respect weekends.
Read the story
Issue #012
Works On My Machine
War stories· 6 min read
Works On My Machine
The four most expensive words in software. What container drift really costs — and the surprisingly boring fix.
Read the story
Founders on the record
What people say when the fires are out.
“
Ali walked into a five-alarm fire and had us shipping in three weeks. He's the calmest person you'll ever meet on a Slack call at 2am.
“
He translated our engineering mess into a boardroom conversation. That alone paid for the engagement twice over.
“
We hired him for a two-week audit. He stayed nine months. Best decision we made that year.
Newsletter
Join The CTO Chronicles.
One email a week. Startup lessons, CTO comics, rescue stories and the founder mistakes I keep watching people repeat. No fluff, no sponsored takes.
- New comic issues before they hit the site
- Field notes from active rescues (anonymized)
- The one email a week I'd actually read myself
Let's talkSomething on fire?
Something on fire?
Let's put it out.
Book a 30-minute discovery call. No pitch deck, no sales funnel — just a straight conversation about what's broken and whether I'm the right person to help.
Book a discovery call