about

Hello!

My name is Karim Ratib. I consider myself a software “craftsman”, combining professional programmer, architect, tinkerer, learner, speculator, etc.

I’m also a lifelong music fan, learner, player and programmer. I’m deeply involved in a project called music-i18n, which aims at adding support for non-common Western practice to open source music software. I’m contributing to FOSS projects and creating my own around this concept - you can check my music demos here.

I’m currenty serving as MusicXML spec editor and W3C Music Notation Group co-chair.

Professionally, I’m working as a solution architect with the Government of British Columbia. I also offer Drupal consulting services through my own business.

Until 2020, and for ~10 years, I led a fantastic team of programmers at a great, small organization called Meedan. We worked on collaborative annotation systems for social media, notably applied to fact-checking. We open sourced all our code.

Before Meedan, we get into archeology - thanks to Wayback Machine for preserving my sites

• I co-founded a software services company in Egypt called OpenCraft. We made lifelong friendships there
• I maintained a blog called “Confessions of an information junkie”. Lots of half-baked ideas in this one
• I obtained my M.Sc. in Computer Science at Université de Montréal. That was my first website!
• At ITWorx, the first company I joined fresh out of university, I wrote code for Corel MotionStudio 3D, Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Outlook, among many others