Blog
Notes from the field: cloud, AI, leadership, and building startups.
Why the Gulf Will Produce the Next Wave of Logistics Tech Unicorns
Capital, demographics, infrastructure, and regulation are converging in the GCC. A thesis from inside a Qatari delivery platform doing 16M orders a year.
The CTO Role in 2027: Managing Agents, Not Just Engineers
AI agents already review our code and run our migrations. My honest projection of the 2027 engineering org, and which CTO skills appreciate or depreciate.
What 3 A.M. Incidents Taught Me That AWS Certifications Never Did
Twenty production incidents reviewed: why understanding beats fixing, what certifications actually train, and the habits that keep a team calm at 3 a.m.
I Reviewed 400 CVs to Hire 5 Engineers in Qatar. Here's What Stood Out
One quarter of hiring in Doha: the funnel numbers, the signals that predicted great engineers, the red flags that never failed, and what did not matter.
RDS Proxy in Production: What the Docs Don't Tell You
A year of RDS Proxy under 16M orders: multiplexing that works, the pinning trap that silently disables it, and the failover win nobody markets.
Kiro Is the DevOps Engineer I Didn't Know I Needed
AWS's agentic IDE became our platform team's strongest member: Terraform, IAM, CI/CD, runbooks, and real coding skills, with production use cases.
When the War Reached Our Cloud: Evacuating an AWS Region in 6 Hours
The attack that took down AWS Bahrain forced an emergency migration: our DR plan under real fire, and how Kiro moved 63 services in 6 hours, not 3 weeks.
My Team Looks Six Times Bigger, and I Haven't Hired Anyone
How we delegated code review and verification to an AI agent, grew review capacity from 310 to 1,860 cycles a week, and kept a human on every merge.
Real-Time Order Tracking with AWS AppSync: How We Cut Update Latency by 94%
How we replaced REST polling with AWS AppSync subscriptions at Rafeeq: live order tracking and partner alerts in under a second instead of 45.
Scaling Reads on RDS: Auto Scaling Groups, Redis, and CDN Caching in Front of Your Replicas
How we took our RDS read replicas from 74% CPU to 28% while traffic grew, by letting CloudFront and Redis absorb 85% of reads before they ever reach the database.
Shipping LLMs to Production: Lessons from the Trenches
What actually breaks when you put large language models in front of real users, and the engineering practices that keep AI features reliable.
Scaling an Engineering Team from 5 to 30 Without Losing the Plot
The systems, hiring principles, and cultural habits that keep an engineering organization fast as it grows, from a CTO who has lived through the transitions.
Cutting Our Kubernetes Bill: A Practical Playbook
Concrete, ordered steps to reduce Kubernetes infrastructure costs: right-sizing, spot instances, autoscaling, and the observability to keep it that way.
