I'm Mohamad Sakkal, a software developer based in Vienna. I came to Austria from Syria in 2015. I speak Arabic, English, and German.
What I Do
I've been building Cortex, an AI-powered journaling app that helps people make sense of their health over time. You write or speak freely, and the app remembers everything, organizes it, finds patterns, and gives you an assistant that actually knows your history.
I built it alone because I needed something like it and it didn't exist. The idea came from my own experience trying to track how different things in my life (medications, routines, environments) affect how I feel and function day to day.
I also built Scribe MD, a native macOS Markdown editor with live preview, math rendering, Mermaid diagrams, presentations, and PDF export. No Electron, no subscriptions. Available on the Mac App Store.
How It's Built
Cortex is a native iOS app written in Swift and SwiftUI, with CoreData for local persistence and AWS Bedrock powering the AI. I built everything myself: voice input, semantic search across your entry history, NLP that organizes unstructured writing into health data, and a conversational assistant that works with your full context.
Why I Write
I've learned a lot about navigating systems that weren't built for people like me, and about what it takes to keep going when the path forward isn't clear. I write about what I've experienced and what I'm building.
Contact
I'm open to the right opportunity or collaboration. If you're building something where this kind of experience is relevant, I'd like to talk.
Email: contact@msakkal.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/MS443
Cortex: ms-dev.app
Scribe MD: ms-dev.app/scribe
Writing
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March 16, 2026
Why I'm Building Cortex
No app existed that could hold the complexity of what I was trying to track. So I started building one.
cortex building