About
Hi, I’m Afif.
I’m Afif Bin Alam, and Real Roots Media is my studio. I design and build websites, web apps and the systems behind them — and I look after them once they’re live.
The honest version
Real Roots Media is a one-person studio. There’s no team page because there’s no team — and that’s on purpose. When you work with me, the person on the call is the person designing the pages, writing the code and answering your email.
I didn’t come up through an agency. I learned by shipping real things. ESC Predictions began as a small site built solo on a $0 budget and grew into a full Eurovision data site covering every contest since 1956. PaperMunch put 35,000+ past papers on a desk students can write on. Sortle took me into browser extensions, payments and privacy-first design. On the infrastructure side, I’ve built and deployed a full-stack web app with separate user accounts on my own VPS.
If you want something built properly instead of templated, that’s what you get here.
No padded client list, no invented team, no stock photos of people shaking hands. Just a studio that’s small, still growing, and hands-on with everything it takes on.
Why “Real Roots”
Most of a website is underground. The structure, the speed, the code, the parts that make search engines trust it — nobody sees them, but they decide whether a site still stands in two years or quietly falls apart.
Page builders and templates skip that part. I start there. That’s the idea behind the name, and behind the logo: a small sprout, with a root system bigger than it is.
How I work
Three things that won’t change as the studio grows.
Direct communication
You talk to the person doing the work. Questions get answered by the person who actually knows the answer.
The whole stack, one pair of hands
Design, frontend, backend and deployment stay consistent, because one person holds the whole picture.
Small on purpose
A small number of projects at a time, each done properly. The goal isn’t to become an agency.
Say hello
Tell me what you’re building.
A few sentences is enough. I read every message myself — and if I’m not the right fit for it, I’ll say so.