Posts by rozumem
I'm reading a book called _The Coaching Habit_ so I can coach my team better and specifically make my 1:1s with them more productive. While reading, I came across a quote by Peter Block who defines an adult-to-adult relationship as one in which you are > able to ask for what you want, knowing that the answer may be No and negotiating the difference. I really like this quote. Saying 'No' is often…
I finished reading *SPQR* by Mary Beard a few months back. In this overdue post, I share things that are important to keep in mind when casual history nerds like myself read about Roman history and ancient history more generally. ## No maps or formal dating system Maps and dates are taken for granted when studying Roman history. But Romans, at least pre-empire, had no maps nor dates. They had no…
I recently learned about the Doorman Fallacy and couldn't help but connect it to an experience I had last weekend. The Doorman Fallacy is 'the mistake of assuming technology can replace a human without consequence'. This past Saturday, six of us had an impromptu brunch after our morning yoga class. Like many venues, this one had made a decision to replace physical menus with a QR code. Personally,…
I recently got suckered into subscribing to NYTimes because I wanted to read an article behind a paywall and I couldn't find an easy and quick alternative. I didn't mind the $2.00 a month. But I took offense to what happened after I paid. Over the course of the next 5 days, they sent me 5 onboarding marketing emails and I could not opt out of any of them. What's worse is their message in the…
Rental car insurance is broken in Dubai. After being the victim of a hit and run, I believe there's a business opportunity to make it better. ## Hit and Run I recently rented a car to play host during a family visit. Being my first time driving in Dubai, I got the car a week before their arrival so I could familiarize myself with the roads and overall system. On the second day, I noticed a new…
On Feb 24, 2026 we started to see a rise in user complaints saying they're not receiving our emails. They all had one in thing in common: Microsoft as their email provider. Since I'd never encountered this before, my first reaction was to check my Sendgrid logs for details. According to the logs, emails to Hotmail, Live, MSN, and Outlook email addresses were being `Deferred`. Emails to other email…
In early March, due to the unexpected war in the ME, I was contemplating my next move. Should I stay or leave? Flights were still taking off from Dubai, albeit at a limited frequency. Enterprising car rental companies were offering package deals to wealthy expats where they'd drive you to Oman and get you on a plane to wherever (Oman was more open so there were more flights to more places). While…
Shipping new features for users and watching them gobble it up is the greatest Joy of being a coder. I quit my day job to bootstrap a SaaS to maximize this Joy in my life. I didn't expect Joy to wane and wither away by year 7. While it's been supplanted by other positive developments like more customers and increasing revenues, which makes the situation tolerable, I miss Joy in it's most raw form.…
This title may seem tongue-in-cheek in a world where seldom a day goes by without hearing a friend, colleague, or a viral post touting how AI saved them *hours*, if not *days*, of engineering work. In fact, just this week a friend humbly bragged to me about how he used AI to implement a self-hosted DNS server in Go, and he didn't even know Go! Alas, the title is accurate. Ironically, I've been too…
There's a cafe I go to for my daily midday tea breaks. It occupies a street corner where you place an order through a window while peering into a kitchen slightly bigger than the size of a food truck. It sells a small cup of kadak chai for 1.50 dirhams. Across the street is a Starbucks which sells a medium cup of tea for 14 dirhams. The disparity used to shock me initially but now I don't bat an…
Nothing like a Cloudflare outage to inspire another blog post. I learned from the last incident and was able to turn off the CF proxy early on while it was still possible to do so. This kept my website up during most of the outage as requests were bypassing CF and hitting my origin servers directly. However, in turning off the CF proxy, I noticed one flaw in my infrastructure. When I turned off…
Anyone who is remotely tech savvy doesn't need Google to tell them 'Phishing is one of the top ways bad actors intrude and steal data.' We recently witnessed a phishing attack on the npm supply chain. Luckily it was caught before having major repercussions. But it got me thinking: what steps can we take to prevent it from happening again? Or at least reduce the probability. Recently I was doing…
I recently had to make some performance optimizations. These are my favorite kind of coding task as they usually require some sort of creativity and tradeoff. This time around I also learned more about Redis and practiced using AI to generate code. During my refactor, I came across a need to upsert a `(member, score)` into a Redis sorted set only if the Redis sorted set exists. This upsert would…
I recently moved into a one bedroom apartment in Marsa Dubai (a.k.a. Dubai Marina). Being my first time renting in Dubai, it has been quite the learning experience. In this post, I share some observations and tips. I assume the following: * You already have an Emirates ID and are in Dubai * You're looking to rent an apartment for one year * You want to sign a rental contract within 2-3 weeks ##…
On August 21, 2025 PagerDuty alerted me that my Node server is taking way too long to respond. What made this event stressful is that when I tailed the server logs, I had never seen this kind of issue before. My knowledge of devops is shaky to begin with. Meanwhile users were suffering and messages were piling up on HelpScout (this unfortunately occurred during peak hours). Even though the issue…
Recently, I decided to move to Dubai under their Virtual Work visa scheme. This is a one-year renewable visa for remote workers making more than $3500 USD per month. In this post, I outline the process I went through in case it helps someone else looking to do the same. ## Why Dubai Since I started my SaaS business, I've had the luxury of being able to work from anywhere. I've been moving from…
I'm working on something which is not interesting nor time critical. Before I realize what I've done, I’ve opened a new tab, typed in **Y** or **R** and pressed **Enter**. The page loads in milliseconds. My eyes are feasting on my Reddit or Youtube feed, hunting for a quick dopamine boost to distract me from the mundane task at hand. Courtesy of their sophisticated recommendation algorithms, I…