Julien Hosri — designer + engineer
self-taught at 14, twelve years shipping software across eight industries. Julien is the co-founder of Maxiphy — a UX-driven software company where he designs, ships, and trains the design + engineering team on real product. koalia is the bootcamp he built so that everything learned in those years of shipping flows into the next generation of designers. he teaches every session of cohort KO-1 himself — no TAs, no junior leads, no outsourced lectures. previously created and ran the UI/UX bootcamp at SE Factory (250+ students).
how Julien got here
Julien started as a software engineer and pivoted into design out of frustration — every product he shipped felt right under the hood and wrong on the surface. That tension became the spine of his teaching: form follows function; consistency is key; users form an opinion in 0.05 seconds.
He co-founded Maxiphy — a UX-driven software company shipping real product across eight industries. At Maxiphy he designs the interfaces, ships the code, and trains the in-house design + engineering team on the same craft koalia now teaches publicly. The patterns Maxiphy ships are the case studies koalia students get to dissect.
Before koalia, he taught the UI/UX bootcamp at SE Factory — the most-cited tech bootcamp in Lebanon — where he ran every cohort from curriculum design through demo day. Over six years he taught 250+ students, most of whom landed first jobs in product design within six months of graduating.
koalia is a new bootcamp built on top of all of that — twelve years of shipping at Maxiphy, six years of teaching at SE Factory, and a 2026-current syllabus that treats AI tools like Cursor, v0, Lovable, and Figma Make as part of the craft, not a replacement for it. Every session is taught live by Julien.
things Julien says often
- “i'm not a designer, i'm a developer — the line every engineer says before they realize design is just engineering for humans.”— Julien Hosri, founder, koalia · ex-lead instructor of the UI/UX bootcamp at SE Factory (250+ students)
- “stop using AI everywhere. start understanding why interfaces work.”— Julien Hosri, founder, koalia · ex-lead instructor of the UI/UX bootcamp at SE Factory (250+ students)
- “form follows function. consistency is key.”— Julien Hosri, founder, koalia · ex-lead instructor of the UI/UX bootcamp at SE Factory (250+ students)
- “users form an opinion in 0.05 seconds. design like that's the only deadline that matters.”— Julien Hosri, founder, koalia · ex-lead instructor of the UI/UX bootcamp at SE Factory (250+ students)
brands he's shipped
Across eight industries — entertainment, fintech, healthcare, education, logistics, events, retail, f&b — Julien has shipped interfaces used by hundreds of thousands of people. A small slice of the public-facing brands he's contributed to:
industries touched · entertainment · fintech · healthcare · education · logistics · events · retail · f&b
six years, 250+ students
SE Factory is Lebanon's most-cited tech bootcamp — covered by Course Report, Wamda, Berytech, and Switchup. From 2018 to 2024, Julien designed and led its UI/UX track. He built the syllabus, ran admissions, taught every cohort, and graded every final project.
Most of his SE Factory students were career-changers — graphic designers moving into product, engineers wanting to design what they ship, founders who wanted taste before they hired. Roughly 80% of the ones who finished landed product-design work within six months, often inside Lebanon (Beirut Digital District employers, fintech startups) and increasingly remote with Gulf and European companies.
koalia is the next program Julien founded in 2026 — independent of SE Factory, grounded in the product work he ships every week at Maxiphy, with a smaller cohort and a curriculum updated for the AI-tooling era. SE Factory continues to run its own UIX bootcamp under its current faculty team.
learn UI/UX from Julien — live, eight weeks
elsewhere on koalia
- cohort · KO-1what KO-1 covers.
eight weeks, three phases, demo day jury. Julien teaches every session.
read → - answers · for engineersengineer → designer.
Julien made the switch himself. the five steps that work.
read → - comparekoalia vs SE Factory.
two separate programs Julien has led — side-by-side, with verdicts by persona.
read →