Hi, I'm Faris. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Ministry of Programming, a product studio and venture builder with teams in Sarajevo and Stockholm. We help founders put together teams, ship products and grow them, mostly in fintech, health tech and music tech.

I started out as a designer, became a programmer, and spent years as a software engineer and architect before moving into product leadership. In 2015 my co-founders and I bootstrapped Ministry of Programming with our own savings and no outside investors. Since then the studio has built more than a hundred digital products and was named to the Financial Times FT1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies in 2020 and 2024.

Back when I was writing code every day, I spent my evenings answering questions on Stack Overflow and ended up in the top 1% of contributors. Nearly 200 answers on JavaScript, C# and .NET have reached around 1.6 million developers. My favourite is still an explanation of trampolines in JavaScript, a small trick that stops recursion from blowing up the call stack. It taught me what this site is built on: you only really understand something once you can explain it to a stranger.

Outside the studio I invest in early-stage startups as an angel and mentor founders. I've spoken at DOERS Summit in Athens and Fast Growth Icons in Berlin, among others; the recordings are collected under talks & interviews.

Why this site

Honestly, I write for myself first. I've never really understood anything until I've tried to explain it, and I've learned that the gap between nodding along to a topic and actually getting it is usually a long stretch of reading, getting things wrong and starting over. This site is where I go through that stretch in public.

Each essay begins with a question I can't stop thinking about: how much power AI actually needs, what happens to work and money when machines can do most of it, what software engineering turns into next. Then I go down the rabbit hole. I read the papers, chase the numbers back to their sources, and write until the picture in my head holds together. Usually it doesn't the first time, so I rewrite. Sometimes a lot.

Not everything here is a deep dive. Alongside the long essays you'll find shorter opinion pieces on engineering teams, startups, remote work and the craft of building software, some going back to 2016 when I started writing on Medium. Those are me putting a stake in the ground: strong opinions, weakly held. I'd rather say something clear and be corrected than hedge everything into mush.

There's a practical side to this too. A lot of what I write about ends up shaping how I invest, in public stocks, in private companies as an angel, and in crypto. Researching where energy, compute and software are heading is how I form a view on which bets make sense. Writing it down forces me to be honest about what I actually know, and what I'm only hoping for. To be clear, that's how I think about my own money. Nothing here is financial advice, and I may hold positions in companies or assets I write about.

So treat everything here as a work in progress. These pieces will change as I learn more, and some of what I believe today will turn out to be wrong. If you spot where, or you know something I've missed, tell me in the comments under any post. I'd love this to be a place where we figure things out together: the best pieces here got better because someone pushed back.

Thanks for reading. It means a lot that you're here.

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