I'm Hicham Markouche, most people call me Jad. I'm a senior UI/UX designer with over 10 years of experience in UI and 6+ years in UX, and I've built a solid background in front-end development along the way.

My story starts when I was 8 years old. My dad used to leave for work, and my mom, tired of watching me from a distance, eventually let me wander into his workshop. That's where I found paint, broken electronics, and hand tools. My curiosity took over. I wanted to know what everything was for and how it worked, so I opened up an old TV just to try putting it back together, mixed colors I probably shouldn't have mixed, and tried to make something I could show off to my family as a little genius.

Then my dad bought a computer for my older brother, who password-protected it right away, worried I'd mess up his work. That backfired. It pushed me to spend hours every day reading forums and blogs, trying to figure out how computers actually worked, until I learned how to crack a Windows password. I still remember watching my brother retype his password again and again, confused, before I quietly tried mine and it worked. The look on his face, somewhere between shock and disbelief, gave me a rush I still chase today. That was the first time I really fell for learning and figuring things out on my own. Once my brother came around to what I could do, he introduced me to Photoshop, HTML, CSS, and Joomla. I picked them up fast and built my own site for music and videos, put Google AdSense on it, and realized something that stuck with me: you can actually get paid doing what you love.

Once I knew what I was passionate about and finished high school, I was already supporting myself through my own websites and AdSense earnings. That gave me the freedom to move to a different city and take real design and fine art classes, which led to my bachelor's degree in 2013. Around that same time, I was building and managing websites for small businesses and restaurants, combining the development skills I'd taught myself with design and art skills I was still sharpening.

That mix of design and development is what pulled me toward UI and UX, where I get to build products that actually make sense for the people using them, while still hitting what the business needs.

I feel lucky that what I do for work is also what I'm genuinely into. I'm grateful for the curiosity I started with, and I try to keep it sharp by always learning something new.