Software engineer · product designer · digital transformation advisor
Building software since 2008, now at Booking.com. Before that, Spotify, Backbase, and Udacity. I’ve open sourced dozens of projects, and maintain the ones people use.
I run Harf Labs, and Unblock Syria with a lot of help. I’m from Aleppo, live in Amsterdam, and write here in Arabic and English.
Building something new at Harf Labs. Restoring digital access with Unblock Syria.
Experimenting with water fasting. Practicing thuluth, slowly.
One Open Graph image per route, built two ways: HarfBuzz and resvg at build time, satori per request. Then the part that breaks in Arabic — word order, letter joining, and measuring text the font draws differently than it measures.
Syria went on the American terrorism list in 1979 and came off it on Monday. I wrote the careful version for Unblock Syria. This is the one where I'm happy, and still angry.
Arabic handwriting: 0.8% word error. Classical calligraphy: 45%. I went looking for the missing training data behind that gap and found the opposite — rules written down in the tenth century, and encoded in software in the 1980s.
Four and a half months, twenty-five patches carried against VLC's own source, and one feature I still cannot ship. What it takes to own a C engine instead of consuming one.
Add a member to a type you do not own and it lands in that type's namespace, not yours. SwifterSwift hit this past five hundred extensions. Here is the wrapper that fixes it, and why you have to choose it before your first release.