Blogs
Things I have worked through and written down, from engineering problems to whatever else took long enough to be worth explaining. Mostly the accounts I went looking for and could not find.
design-extract Went From 0 to 4,000 GitHub Stars. Here's Every Number, Including the Month It Got Zero.
The real star and download data behind design-extract, my open source design system extractor: 1,000 stars in four days, a slow second month, zero stars in July while GitHub had my account restricted, and the climb back to 4,000.
Six Months, Three Road Tests and Two Failed Angle Parks: Getting a Dubai Driving Licence
The full account of getting a UAE driving licence through Bin Yaber, covering the theory test, internal assessments, the RTA parking yard and three road tests. Every fault I got recorded for, what caused it, and what actually changed between failing and passing.
GitHub Flagged My Account as Spam for 58 Days. 93% of the Flagged Activity Came From GitHub's Own Copilot.
My GitHub account got restricted by automated abuse detection. I exported 19,173 rows of security log data and found 93% of the flagged OAuth activity came from GitHub's own Copilot integrations, not from me. Here's the data, the root cause, and what actually got the account back.
designlang vs dembrandt vs extract-design-system: Which Design Extractor Should You Use?
An honest comparison of three open source tools that pull a design system out of a live website, written by the person who built one of them. What each one outputs, how they extract, where they fall short, and when the other two are the better pick.
I Stayed in Dubai When My Friends Flew Home: What Academic City Was Actually Like
When things escalated in the region this year, most of my friends left the country. I stayed on campus in Dubai Academic City on my own. This is an honest account of what that was like, including the alert that woke everyone up and the parts that genuinely scared me.
Millions of Views, Then I Stopped Posting: What Sim Racing Reels Taught Me About the Algorithm
I ran a sim racing account that pulled millions of views. The clip that went furthest was one where I drove badly and people piled on. Here's what actually drove the numbers, why I quit, and what I play now.