Louay Akkad is a seasoned technology leader and current CTO based in London with 15 years of experience building scalable consumer-facing products and engineering organisations. He has led large multi-platform teams (web, iOS, Android) and operational improvements that cut release times from hours to minutes, rebuilt search latencies to under 100ms, and rolled out internationalisation including RTL and Arabic branding across products. At Fresha he drove engineering standards—introducing strong API typings and documentation, automated CI/CD, contract testing, and visual-regression checks—that materially improved developer velocity in a 150-engineer monorepo. Earlier roles at McKinsey and as an early engineer at Urban Massage show he pairs strategic advisory and hands-on delivery, standing up new ventures and scaling services across countries. He’s an active front-end contributor to major open-source projects like Material-UI and jQuery Mobile, notably adding RTL support and theme refactors that reflect a deep attention to international UX details. Practical, methodical and product-minded, he blends architecture, people leadership and frontend craftsmanship to turn complex problems into shipped outcomes.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computing, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computing at University of Portsmouth
Material UI: Comprehensive React component library that implements Google's Material Design. Free forever.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Contributions:15 commits, 15 PRs, 71 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Louay primarily contributed to the Material UI React component library by implementing RTL (Right-to-Left) support. Their work included modifications to existing components like `CardActions`, `CardExpandable`, `TextField`, and `MenuItem` to ensure proper rendering in RTL layouts. Furthermore, the user refactored theme-related code and fixed bugs related to the `TimePicker` and other components within the project.
Contributions summary:Louay primarily contributed to the UI elements and styling of the jQuery Mobile framework. Their work included implementing theme customization for form elements like checkboxes and radio buttons, ensuring better visual integration. The user also addressed styling issues and made code style improvements to match jQuery's guidelines, while also adjusting button positioning and handling :visited states. These commits demonstrate a focus on improving the visual appearance and user experience of the framework.
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