Life in Production

Call Me Ali

A twelve-year-old in West Beirut is told to borrow a Muslim name to stay safe. Twenty years later in Germany, a registration clerk assumes the name anyway. The same scar, read two different ways.

  • Deep Dive · Lebanon · Levant · Identity · Sectarianism · Faith · Parenting · Diaspora
  • August 3, 2026  ·  11 min read
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The Compromise You Can't See Coming

Moving from a protected Staff Engineer role in Europe to planning a future venture back in the Levant exposes a brutal conflict: how do you compete against agencies built on exploitation without becoming exactly like them?

  • Deep Dive · Entrepreneurship · Work Culture · Levant · Ethics
  • July 12, 2026  ·  10 min read
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The BMW 316i M-Powered: Flashy Badges, Broken Engines

Why overextended expats buy luxury status symbols and dying companies sign nine-figure software contracts. An exploration of the same broken architecture playing out at human scale and corporate scale.

  • Deep Dive · Tech Culture · Software Architecture · Business Strategy · GCC · Levant · Engineering Culture
  • July 5, 2026  ·  7 min read
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The Cult of Complexity: From Internet Cafes to AI Chatbots

An architectural critique of herd mentality and local hubris. Tracking how the cultural stigma of 'ready-made' assets mutates from empty 90s internet cafes and stripped Mercedes sensors straight into insecure 'custom' codebases and modern AI chatbot loops.

  • Deep Dive · Tech Culture · Software Architecture · AI · Business Strategy · Engineering Culture
  • June 28, 2026  ·  12 min read
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Finding the Spark: From Breaking PCs to Building Developer Experience

How I went from breaking PCs as a kid to engineering Developer Experience, and the father who lit the spark but never got to see where it led.

  • Deep Dive · Career · Developer Experience · Origin Story · Engineering Culture
  • June 21, 2026  ·  12 min read
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Four Years and One Afternoon

My personal site sat almost frozen for four years. Changing a profile picture took three commits and two merges. Then I opened one conversation with Claude, and in an afternoon it became a different site.

  • Deep Dive · AI · Developer Experience · Claude · Web
  • June 18, 2026  ·  9 min read
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