I'm Hamza — a self-taught developer who loves turning complex technical challenges into clean, maintainable, and scalable systems that teams can trust.

My name is Hamza Zellal, a 30-year-old self-taught Software Developer based in Morocco. I studied at Université Abdelmalek Essaâdi and have over four years of experience designing, building, and maintaining scalable web applications and backend systems.
I enjoy solving complex technical challenges, writing clean and maintainable code, and continuously learning new technologies to strengthen my skills. I'm passionate about building reliable, high-performance software and collaborating with teams to deliver impactful solutions.
I've always worked for myself — running my independent practice, Zellal Dev Consultings, where I partner with startups and product teams to design, build, and ship backend and web systems end-to-end.
A pragmatic, full-stack toolkit — with a backend heart. I pick the right tool for the problem and go deep.
Independent from day one — the story of building my own practice, Zellal Dev Consultings.
Partner directly with startups and product teams to architect and build backend platforms — distributed, event-driven systems handling high request volumes. Recent work includes cutting p99 latency by ~40% on a payments service and setting up observability and CI/CD from scratch.
Expanded into longer-term engagements with recurring clients across e-commerce and logistics: multi-tenant SaaS backends, secure REST & GraphQL APIs, containerized deployments, and database performance work through query optimization and caching.
Started out as an independent developer, delivering end-to-end web solutions for startups and small businesses — from responsive frontends to reliable APIs — while teaching myself modern engineering practices and a solid foundation in system design.
A few things I've built — production systems and open-source alike.
A high-throughput API gateway with rate-limiting, auth, and observability baked in — handling 5k+ req/s with sub-10ms overhead.
A modular e-commerce backend: catalog, cart, payments, and orders as independent services with a clean domain model and full test coverage.
A real-time notifications & presence engine powering live dashboards, built on WebSockets and an event-streaming backbone.
A self-hostable CI/CD & service-health dashboard that aggregates pipelines, deploys, and uptime into one calm, readable view.
Have a project, a role, or an idea worth discussing? I'm always happy to talk about backends, systems, and clean code.
Say hello →