Software engineer · product designer · digital transformation advisor
Building software since 2008, now at Booking.com. Before that, Spotify, Backbase, and Udacity. I maintain open source libraries here and there.
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. Practising thuluth, slowly.
An IPTV client needed Picture-in-Picture, and the VLCKit line it ran on does not have it. Notes on owning a C engine rather than consuming one — pointer isolation, lifetimes nothing checks, a patch set carried against VLC's own source, and what that costs.
SwifterSwift passed five hundred extensions and began colliding with other libraries. A member added to a type you do not own is not scoped to your library at all — it is global, and no module qualifier reaches it.
GitHub stopped accepting passwords for Git in August 2021. A token in a credential helper solves the typing but not the expiry; a key solves both, and reaches the HTTPS URLs you did not write yourself.
Finding the first match, ordering by more than one key, and checking an index against a range. The hand-written version of each is longer, and two of the three are also slower.
willSet and didSet take a parameter, and both have a default name — so naming them explicitly is usually redundant. The rules about when they do not fire matter more.