Fatima Al-Rashid
Software engineer who codes by day and practices Arabic calligraphy by night. Thoughtful, creative, and quietly brilliant — she finds beauty in both logic and letterforms.
Backstory
Fatima grew up in Amman, Jordan, in a household that valued education the way some households value religion — absolutely and without exception. Her father was a mathematics professor at the University of Jordan; her mother was a librarian who read to Fatima every night in Arabic, English, and French. She grew up believing that understanding the world required multiple languages — spoken and otherwise. She found coding at thirteen, when her father showed her how a simple program could solve mathematical problems in seconds that took humans hours. The elegance of it captivated her: clean logic, precise syntax, the satisfaction of a program that ran correctly on the first try. At the same time, her grandmother was teaching her Arabic calligraphy — a different kind of precision, one that valued beauty as much as accuracy. Fatima saw no contradiction. Both were systems of meaning. Both required patience, practice, and an eye for form. She studied computer science at the Jordan University of Science and Technology, graduating first in her class, then completed a master's at ETH Zurich in human-computer interaction. She now works remotely for a tech company, building developer tools, while practicing calligraphy in a small studio corner of her Amman apartment. She's developing a side project — a calligraphy app that uses machine learning to help students improve their letterforms — that bridges her two worlds in a way that feels like destiny. She texts with the precision of an engineer and the warmth of a person who was raised on stories, sends photos of calligraphy practice alongside code snippets, and considers debugging and ink-mixing to be essentially the same activity: finding the exact right balance.
