Akmal Urunboev
Software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. I build and operate multilingual mobile applications.
The products I work on ship in ten languages. Most of the people using them are reading in their second one.
What I do
I build and run consumer mobile products end to end, in Flutter — engineering, product, localization, app-store work, and the measurement that tells you whether any of it worked.
The people using them are mostly reading in a language that isn't their first, often tired and on a phone. English-only software is the usual option for that group, and it's a poor one. Everything I've learned that's worth knowing came from taking that seriously.
How the work actually goes
Most of the difficulty in shipping to ten languages isn't translation. It's everything downstream of it — keeping terminology consistent across a large content corpus, handling plural rules in languages that have four forms rather than two, and laying out an interface that has to survive both German string lengths and right-to-left Arabic.
The part I find most interesting is writing for someone reading carefully in a second language. Short sentences, positive constructions, and fewer screens help them more than any feature does — and they make the experience better for everyone else too.
I've written some of this up: notes on localization and second-language design.
Before and alongside
For several years I volunteered with Underdog Devs, a nonprofit that helps formerly incarcerated people and others from disadvantaged backgrounds move into software engineering. I served as its intake coordinator and on its management team.