Remember the days when becoming a partner for an ERP product was a privilege? You could become a SAP and Oracle partner only if you were self-sufficient as a business, having a certain amount of revenue and head-count. This meant that if you were a small struggling business or a freelancer, then becoming a partner for an ERP product wasn’t even an option.

At Frappe, it’s been one of our major successes to enable every skillful individual to be able to offer services on open-source Frappe apps, and live their dream of being independent and free. That’s what the value of Frappe is, freedom!

This is a story of Alaa Alsalehi, a developer from Rafah, Gaza. As I interview him, they are living in a refugee camp, under the fear of being attacked at any moment. However, despite all the adversities, they are not just earning their living from Frappe, but choose to also build products using Frappe Framework. Let’s hear it from Alaa.

Who is Alaa?

My name is Alaa Alsalehi. I am a software engineer with more than 15 years experience in different frameworks and programming languages. I have a Master degree in computer engineering from Islamic university of Gaza. I am the founder of RUKN, one of the companies helping SMEs to transform digitally.

Early Days

My original city is Lod, one of the oldest cities in human history. This city was occupied by Israel in 1948 and my grandparents migrated to Gaza city after a famous massacre happened in the city mosque. My grandparents live in Gaza and my grandfather died when my father was one year old. My grandmother raised my father to become a civil engineer, married my mother and lives in Saudi Arabia and has me and my brothers there. I lived in Saudi Arabia for 18 years and moved back to Gaza to have higher education. I worked in Gaza and ended up like my grandparents, a refugee in Rafah city. It is a long tragedy that we live as a Palestinians.

Before this war we have some life at Gaza sure we have instability in internet and electricity and every two years we have a war but we can manage and we was keep working and deliver to our clients, after this war everything is missing even the most primitive needs of human include food, fire and healthcare. First three months of war age - yes this war have a life to us 😣- we was not able to manage and lost all of our projects. The uncertainty was high but we learned how to live this new life and back to work and deliver with our loveable partners and clients.

Discovering Frappe & ERPNext

Actually, it was a lovely story. I was moving to a new company as a tech manager. It was a non tech company working in the retail field. They have an in-house developed erp system and they do not have its source code. My choice was to choose one of the off-shelf ERPs and adopt it to the company. Back then I did not have a lot of knowledge about ERP systems. I was coming from native development or frameworks development background building mini frameworks over different frameworks also playing with different open source but no experiences on building systems using readymade systems. So I decided to ask my friends about ERP systems. At that time I had Ahmed Abdalrahman, my beloved friend. I called him and asked “what he thought”. He drove me to the ERP domain and suggested ERPNext as a solution to my dilemma. This was a great journey that ended up with this company adopting ERPNext in every daily operation.

Open-source in a region like Gaza

We have a great development community here in Gaza. I can mention more than 50 companies that have offices here in Gaza. As one of the leaders of the tech community in Gaza, I released different initiatives to help developers and to increase the number of people building their software using open source technologies. Actually we succeeded in developing some carriers and creating jobs for developers through open sources. but I think this is a long way and we just take a few steps only.

We love to have more support in this area and I invite companies to try investing here at Gaza human resources. We really have great minds that need to be discovered.

Building Career around Open source

I started my career in helping companies adopt ERPNext in their companies in 2020. My first steps were hard. Actually I had a good development experience and I was missing the domain expertise and if you work in our field you will know this is a huge part of the deal. In these three years I led different teams to build SaaS software, services and integrate with different third parties all of that over ERPNext. I wrote a lot about my experiences in helping companies adopt ERPNext through the whole process from migration to deployment and development and through enhancing business.You can reach those articles on my medium account here.

Stories of Frappe and ERPNext Implementations

Actually I love when I saw our clients in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq and Libya build their success over our solutions. I saw companies with multiple branches working in multiple countries and have more than 1000 transactions daily. That makes us proud and love our job.

One of the lovely stories I always love to tell is our story with MTC-Iraq. I was introduced to Mr. Hadi Sanouree to help them exceed critical conditions. They needed help through their development team. So we stood for them, rebuilt and optimized their GIT repos and helped them to manage servers and delivered together many challenging projects for international enterprise clients. Now, they are one of the leading companies in the ERP field in Iraq, and we have strong relations with them. On a personal level Hadi was one of the few people who connected on a daily basis asking me about my family in this war.

Frappe Apps by Rukn

I love to add that we at RUKN are trying to employ Gazan persons and help them to develop their skills. Before the war we were just starting and we had five developers, mainly Frappe developers. We lost our office and we lost one of our developers Bahaa Abu Shaqra. But that will never stop us. We built two apps published on Frappe Cloud only Branchy and Email Reminder and we are working on two more apps. Also we are developing for three clients.

Closing Words

Being part of the great Frappe community makes me proud. We developers are changemakers and our work is recognized even when we live in a very critical situation. With the help of the right tools, we can even make a huge difference in people's lives.

If we can do it in Gaza, you will be able to do more!