Two people, and nobody to hand your project to

Abdul builds the parts of a project that have to talk to something else: a booking calendar, a price list, a stock feed, a search engine. He started BLANQ after several years of watching small businesses buy software that could not reach any of the systems they already ran on.

His approach to AI is deliberately unglamorous. Before any assistant gets built he sits with whoever answers the phone and writes down the decision tree they actually use, because that document is what separates something useful from an expensive novelty. He is equally willing to tell a client they do not need one, which has happened twice and saved both of them a considerable amount of money.

He works in French and English, handles the technical search work on every BLANQ project, and is the person who will tell you which of your five requested features is the one that will actually move revenue.

Nazif owns how a BLANQ site feels: how quickly it paints, how it behaves on a five-year-old Android on transit wifi, and whether someone using a keyboard or a screen reader can finish the same tasks as everyone else. He treats a performance budget as a constraint the design has to live within, not a target to aim at afterwards.

He came to development through back-end work, and it shows in how he structures a front end. Content gets modelled before a single screen is designed, so that by launch the client can change every heading, price and photograph on the site without opening a support ticket. It is the least visible part of the job and the one clients thank him for a year later.

On the Atelier Marchand catalogue he took an eleven-second page to under a second on a throttled connection without touching a single photograph the studio had chosen. He is also the one who insists a site works before it is decorated.