Welcome
Splitting Lines is the personal website I (Rasheed Hammouda) use to house an increasing number of seemingly disparate projects, dabblings, and miscellany. Since 2010 when I first started writing for work as a freelance writer in Egypt, this website has gone through many forms and reboots as my time and 'personal' projects have ebbed and flowed.
If you're purely interested in looking at where I've worked, you can skip over to my LinkedIn. It's fairly comprehensive as of April 2025, albeit light on details as to what I've done. If you want to learn more about what I have or am currently working on, check out Projects or About. The Posts section houses all my latest writing, art, and ideas that have and may never coalesce into a bigger project. Projects are themselves just that, projects, or otherwise self-contained sets of tightly related ideas or endeavors. Sometimes projects start clearly as such, often they just start as an idea that lands in Posts.
Work with me
As of April 2025 I'm focused solely on my own clients (startups and enterprises) and projects (artistic and otherwise). I am selectively open to new clients or projects; you can contact me about your needs if you're interested in working with me in a professional capacity.
For individuals interested in collaborating, start by checking out Teach Me.
About the name
Words can be fun vessels for sounds and meaning. More than anything, I like the way the name sounds: two syllables cut in half with a hard double-T, followed by the soft, down sloping single syllable. It looks nice, and it sounds nice (to me, clearly).
Early on in my writing it represented a distinct orientation to what I was covering, a desire to split the lines of the people and institutions I wrote about (their party lines, quoted lines, courses of action, etcetera). While the act of "splitting" can imply subsequent equal parts, in my experience critical examination rarely results in somehow symmetrical analysis of equal weight parts (whatever that would mean).
I'm still partial to the original intent of the title. Though as my work has progressed, the name has become a good stand-in for what interests me beyond this: Disparate ideas connected by lines splitting off from one node to the next, running along whatever paths happen to have bearing. Problem/solution trees forking off from one point of context to the next. A personal heritage split across eras, continent, and cultures. And so on.