I can build in English. I can build in Arabic. Both are languages I know well enough to ship a product in, write documentation, and support users. The choice to build in Somali is not a limitation. It is the whole point.

When I started university, I noticed something that probably sounds familiar to anyone who has been through a Somali institution: the slides never changed. The same presentations from three years ago were being circulated again, passed from one student to the next through WhatsApp groups and USB drives. The assignments were built on them. The study sessions were built on them. The entire academic culture of sharing knowledge was running on an infrastructure of group chats and memory sticks.

In my first year, I built a site to fix that. The idea was simple: a place where students could upload their slides and assignments so others could find them later, properly organised, instead of hunting through five different chat groups hoping someone had saved the file. I did not know much at the time. I built it in WordPress with Elementor, which was the technology I had access to and understood. It was not elegant. But it worked, and people used it, and that felt like enough.

What I remember most about that experience is not the technical side. It is the reaction of other students when they realised the interface was something they could navigate without thinking about the words on the screen. We were in an environment where academic tools were entirely in English, where submitting an assignment meant reading instructions in a language that was a second or third one for most people in the room. The site I built was in a language that did not require translation in your head before you could act.

That early experience planted something in me.

There is a version of building products where you pick the largest possible market, localise later if the numbers justify it, and treat language as a feature to be added after product-market fit. I understand that logic. I just do not find it honest when applied to communities that have been waiting a long time for technology to acknowledge them at all.

Somalis are not a small community. There are millions of us, across Somalia, across the diaspora in Europe and North America and the Gulf. We read, we write, we study, we work. We also navigate almost every piece of technology we use in a language that is not ours, which means we carry a small tax on every interaction: the mental effort of translating, of guessing, of asking someone else what a button means.

Building in Somali is my attempt to remove that tax for at least one product.

It is also personal in a way that is harder to articulate. There is something about seeing your language on a screen in a context that is not a news site or a religious text or a government notice. Something about a sign-up form that says what it means in words you grew up speaking. It signals, quietly, that the person who built this was thinking about you when they built it.

I want Somali professionals to have tools that were built with them in mind from the beginning. That is why Qoraal is in Somali. That is why the first thing I build in any project I start now is not the feature list. It is the language.

If the technology works and the language is one you grew up speaking, everything else becomes easier. I saw that in a first-year university project built on WordPress. I see it every time someone moves through Qoraal without stopping to ask what a button means.