Friday, 13 November 2026
Thoughts, stories and ideas.
Building in public isn't a growth hack. Six months in, here's what brought clients, what brought nothing, and the metrics I stopped caring about.
By
1 min read
Self-hosting is sold as freedom and billed as time. Here's the real cost, the real savings, and where I'd tell you not to bother.
By
2 min read
Seven things that mattered, five that didn't, and the salary conversation nobody prepares you for.
By
1 min read
Most AI tools are demos with a subscription attached. The four that survived actually changed how I ship — here's the bar they had to clear.
By
2 min read
Five outages, five root causes, and the lessons that stuck because they cost real money at 2am.
By
2 min read
Building alone has a public face and a private one. This is the private one — the flat weeks, the doubt, and the things that actually helped.
By
2 min read
A billboard intelligence map for the UAE and a gamified personal dashboard, documented while they are still unfinished, plus the open-source projects they share a habit with.
By
1 min read
Five years as a one-person consultancy in the UAE and Saudi Arabia: scoping, pricing outcomes, procurement timelines, and saying no early.
By
1 min read
How a CV actually travels through ATS parsing, recruiter skimming, and agency reformatting in the Gulf market, and the specific changes that get more interviews.
By
1 min read
Streaming speech recognition, LLM translation, speech synthesis, and directional audio inside a single sub-two-second budget, with the tradeoffs that come with it.
By
1 min read