Features for the events platform that went 20x during COVID

The chapter: Dubai

I joined Mazajnet as a Software Engineer and was promoted to Senior within my first year. The reason was not only programming strength. I kept doing competitor analysis and product ownership nobody had asked for, and it turned out to matter.

I went on to lead a team of five, including two seniors, serving several universities as EdTech clients. The work supported the UN Sustainable Development Goals, most directly SDG 4, Quality Education: helping institutions in underdeveloped countries adopt technology. I actively took part in events educating university faculty and management on what technology could do for them. That educator-leader pattern is the same one that later became executive-facing leadership at Ascend and client-facing direction at Tanbits.

From 2018 to 2020 the team built features for vFairs, a bootstrapped virtual-events company out of Coppell, Texas. Then COVID hit, admissions and events moved online, and vFairs grew roughly 20x in a single year on its way to 100M+ attendees and a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader position. We were building during the run-up.

Promoted to senior in year one, for programming and for the product ownership nobody asked for.

The moment. Universities in underdeveloped countries needed technology adoption before it was fashionable. Then a pandemic made it mandatory overnight.

The company and the moment

vFairs was founded in 2016 by CEO Muhammad Younas and CTO Arfeen Godil, headquartered in Coppell, Texas, and bootstrapped with no venture capital. When COVID-19 pushed events and education online, its revenue grew roughly 20x in 2020 to $17.2M, later reaching about $30M a year. It has powered 30,000+ events for 100M+ attendees and 80,000+ exhibitors for around 1,300 customers including Fortune 500 companies. It was named a Leader in the 2025 and 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Event Marketing and Management Platforms and a Gartner Peer Insights Customer Choice from 2023 to 2025.

My part

From 2018 to 2020, my last two years at Mazajnet in Dubai, I built features for vFairs. That was exactly the run-up to the explosion: the platform that would carry universities’ admissions fairs and companies’ conferences through the pandemic was being extended while the world was about to need it.

The EdTech context around it

Mazajnet served the EdTech sector with several universities as clients. I built and maintained platform features for them, and the work supported the UN Sustainable Development Goals, most directly SDG 4, Quality Education, by helping institutions in underdeveloped countries adopt technology. This is SDG-aligned work; the SDGs have no membership.

I also actively took part in events educating university faculty and management on how technology could help their institutions. That was the first time I found myself explaining technology to non-technical leadership, a pattern that became my job description at Ascend and Tanbits.

The engineering

I joined Mazajnet as a Software Engineer and was promoted to Senior within my first year, for programming strength and for the competitor analysis and product ownership I kept doing unprompted. I went on to lead a team of five engineers including two seniors. The stack was PHP and Laravel with MySQL at the core, Vue and Nuxt server-side rendering on the front, Flask services where they fit, and integrations with Stripe Checkout, Twilio, Google Maps, PayPal and the Facebook API. Real-time analytics dashboards pulled from Google Analytics, Mixpanel, New Relic, Stripe Analytics and Hotjar into React and Vue. JIRA for tracking, Swagger for API documentation.