In 2021 I joined the École Nationale Supérieure de l’Intelligence Artificielle (ENSIA) in Sidi Abdellah, Algiers. It was a new school dedicated entirely to AI and data science, and I was one of its first students. Being early meant the school was figuring things out at the same time we were.
The coursework was demanding: machine learning, data mining, software engineering, databases and data warehouses, time-series forecasting, deep learning. But the part that shaped me most happened outside the classroom. I learned fastest when I had something real to build and someone real to build it for.
First projects
My first serious projects were web platforms. The Atex Inspection Platform was an industrial inspection and maintenance tool built with Next.js and Supabase. It taught me how much of “software” is really about understanding a domain and the people working in it: inspectors, maintenance plans, compliance reports.
The first win
In 2023 my team won the Synapson Datathon with an NLP solution combining BERT and TF–IDF. It was a small competition, but it set a pattern I kept for the next three years: take a messy problem, get a working solution in front of judges quickly, and learn from what breaks.
By the end of 2023 I was spending as much time building as studying. That is where the next chapter starts, with the first projects that real users depended on.