About us

Hi there!

I'm Abdeldjalil Fortas (Fcmam5), an Algerian software engineer currently living in Berlin.

I graduated from Oran University1 Ahmed Ben Bella (ex-IGMO). I am grateful for what my country and my community taught me and for everything they gave me.

I always try to give my community back, and always try to give my country the best I can. In a typical "Immigri" fashion, I have hope in Algeria, and I don't want to miss the chance building a better country for us and for our future generations.

The idea to launch this survey is obviously not a creative one, and my initiative is definitely not the first one. I just did it because I felt like it has to be done, because I myself needed to understand some trends, and know more about some challenges so I can capitalize (or invest) in them when I start a business in my home country.

Being an active member, sometimes a lurker, and a moderator of DZ DÉVELOPPEURS one of the biggest Facebook groups in Algeria, I always see the same questions from entrepreneurs, from students and from different actors in the Algerian ICT system... People asking about average salaries, or if a certain language is still relevant in the market, or what's the most used language for building applications for a certain platform.

I wished we had a study, I wished I could see Algeria in the different global developer surveys (like StackOverflow's or the stateOfJS), and when I didn't find any recent reports (other than Assem's for 2020) I pulled the trigger on starting this one.

I got inspired from different surveys, for example:

I also collected some frequently asked questions in DZ DÉVELOPPEURS group, and (of course) used ChatGPT for brainstorming.

My wife provided a great help in designing the survey, fixing PLENTY of typos in the questionnaire, reviewing reports and helping in designing questions for interviews, then of course: fixing PLENTY of typos in the different articles and pages in this website.

Data science and machine learning magic becomes a must when it comes to analyzing 42 Q&A from 500+ people, and that requires people who speak fluent Python and algebra, there where my brother Oussama came to help, he translated my Excel sheets and my questions to Python and interactive graphs.

When I was writing about Open Source, I wanted to interview Djalal Harouni and get his opinions, he replied as the pillar of Algerian Open source he is: he asked me to add him to this website/content repository, and he wrote a big part of the page and enriched it with resources and with positive examples from the Algerian Open Source community.

These people are the reason I use "we", "us" and "our" when talking about this initiative.

This project took us around 4 months, from designing the survey, translating the questionnaire to French and Arabic, validating it and collecting feedback, then promoting it (almost) every day of February 2024. During that month I spammed various groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, contacted a lot of content creators and pages.

Some people were kind enough to share our posts on their networks, others were nicer and they endorsed the initiative and wrote about it in their posts.

For the length of march, I had to squeeze long hours of working on analyzing results, continue designing this website and working on its content in my days along my full-time job and my personal commitments.

When analyzing data and writing the report, we had to make a lot of research to support our statements. We found a lot of useful resources and listed some of them in our appendix page, we also extracted some questions for our expert interviews.

I hope we gave something useful to our community. I hope we delivered insightful results and gained your trust to contribute in our future editions.

If you think this work is worth a tip, you can donate or buy me a coffee, or you can go to the support page.

If you have any questions, or just want to keep in touch, please feel free to connect on Twitter @Fcmam5 or LinkedIn, or via e-mail: au54vz9rk[at]mozmail[.]com.