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 and player. This will often show up in my repos.

I’m currently working as a software engineering contractor, with the Internet Archive and the Government of British Columbia among others.

If you’ve got some interesting music app projects, I’d love to hear from you! I have good experience (including professional work) with Web Audio, Web MIDI, MusicXML, and lots of music theory. You can check my music demos here.

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 offered my services as a Drupal programmer. It was fun for many years
• I maintained a blog called “Confessions of an information junkie”. Lots of half-baked ideas in this one
• I co-founded a software services company in Egypt called OpenCraft. We made lifelong friendships there
• I obtained my M.Sc. in Computer Science at Université de Montréal. That was my first website!
• At ITWorx, the first company I joined (as employee # 1 or 2) I wrote code for Corel MotionStudio 3D, Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Outlook, among many others.