Automating The Deployment of a Codeigniter/PHP Website with Deployer

About 4 months ago, I started using some of my free time to help build Labocine.com, an amazing new platform for science cinema. The back-end is written using the PHP framework Codeigniter. Being at its early stage, the site was hosted on one of those traditional hosting providers. And the deployment of new features was done using the traditional ftp approach. After joining the project and as it grew, I decided to host it on a VPS and automate the deployment process.... Read More

My First Two Weeks At Namshi

On July 10th, I joined Namshi as a Junior Software Engineer. I was really excited to start my first full time job writing software. Though, I have to confess that I was also a bit afraid and nervous. Fortunately, after just two days working with the team the fear and nervousness went away. In this post, I will share with you some of the things I have learned so far as well as what I love about working in this awesome team.... Read More

Speed and Usability Performance of Top UAE Websites.

Google recently pusblished a new version of their PageSpeed API. I wanted to play around with it a bit. So, I decided to build a page that displays a visualization of the speed of some of the most popular UAE websites. I went to Alexa in order to gather the data about the most popular websites in the UAE. I also added a few sites that were not on Alexa’s list.... Read More

Learning new tools by implementing the same project using different languages/frameworks.

I’m always looking for ways to improve my technical skills. And one thing that I hear a lot as advice to software developers is to keep trying new tools and frameworks. So, I have decided to try a couple of languages/frameworks that I either have never used before or have little experience with. The best way for me to do that is by building the same application using those different languages/frameworks.... Read More

A small experiment on Stack Exchange Expatriate

As a programmer I use Stack Overflow a lot. But last week one of my professors asked us to pick one of the Stack Exchange websites that we have never used before and experiment with it by using some of its features. This article is an analysis of my experience with Stack Exchange Expatriates. Why did I pick Stack Exchange Expatriates? Well, I wanted to pick something non technical as I already have a lot of experiences with technical forums such as Stack Overflow, Hacker News, SubReddit cscareerquestions etc.... Read More

Moving My Personal Website from Heroku to Github Pages

When I first built my personal website I deployed it to Heroku. At that time Heroku was the best option for me because it offered a free tier and it was relatively easy to use. But one thing I did not like about it was that the application dyno—the container that handles all the HTTP traffic to the site— would go to sleep if my website receives no traffic in a 30-minute period.... Read More