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afhammad

249 karma · joined January 3, 2011

Self-taught programmer from a young age. Have been in the software industry for ~20 yrs. Enjoy leading and working in small high performing teams.

I've mostly worked with RoR, Clojure and Elixir and lots of infra/platform experience

Twitter: @orinj

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afhammad··on Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool
I've not used Foundry myself but I've been given a demo of it fully implemented at a company.

I agree that the Retool comparison is only a small part of what Foundry offers, and that's my point, I don't know of any open source alternative that comes close to Foundry. They overlap in the sense that they are both tools that can be used as the back-office / operating system of a business, to varying degrees.

afhammad··on Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool
I use Retool extensively at work for internal tooling (A.K.A Backoffice). It's really good in that I don't have to think about it much. There seems to be a new open-source competitor popping up every month, which is great, but I really wish people would get behind one or two of them and make them much stronger contenders.

The comparisons listed (other than being OSS) are mostly superficial and in some cases already available in Retool, perhaps released since that was written.

A better benchmark to aim for would be https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ which is way more powerful.

afhammad··on Build the Modular Monolith First
Oh I see. So you avoid the boilerplate of setting up a new project and configuring it how you like just to try stuff out. That's smart as that part usually takes people down rabbit holes that distract from the main goal.
afhammad··on Build the Modular Monolith First
Curious to hear more. Are these personal projects or serving users? What are some examples of unrelated ideas you’ve tacked on to existing app servers?
afhammad··on Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop
Not OP, but if it's helpful, I use containers for all 3rd party services I need to run for development. (e.g. Postgres, Redis, Localstack, etc). This makes it easy to onboard new developers as they just have to run `docker-compose up` and not worry about those. It also allows me to easily use different versions of those services in different projects or even branches of a project.
afhammad··on Why I program in Erlang (2012)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21111662
afhammad··on Why I program in Erlang (2012)
RabbitMQ is a good example of middleware
afhammad··on RIPE meetings: IP addresses as spoils of war
What are some non-obvious or second order effects of this?
afhammad··on Multiranges in Postgres
I've used tsrange successfully in 2 projects to optimise storage of temporal data. The same can be achieved with start/end timestamp columns at the cost of more complex and error prone queries.

Multiranges could be used to further optimise for storage of duplicate data (if a data pattern repeats at different intervals) but it's not a big enough margin for me yet.

afhammad··on Figma was a huge threat to Adobe's dominance
Quite fond of them. Funds are cool too
afhammad··on Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
Same here, best design software i’ve ever used, especially for web stuff. Sketch came close, although I haven’t used it in a while.
afhammad··on How Segment Found Product Market Fit
Its difficult to say which is the correct approach, but one thing I know is pricing is very hard and getting it wrong is costly. Getting usage first allows for constant valuable feedback but also establishes a value on the product within the user’s mind. What is this worth to them? How much time is it saving them?
afhammad··on Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ
You will also find Clojure just as refreshing / enlightening. My company uses Elixir but I’ve also done a lot of Clojure, give it a shot if you haven’t.
afhammad··on Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it
you could end up in an infinite loop of writing “do it now” and never do “it”
afhammad··on Ask HN: How do you do version control of no-code apps?
More low-code than no-code, but checkout Retool's approach: https://docs.retool.com/docs/source-control
afhammad··on Ask HN: Can I see your cheatsheet?
I use https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/snippets/

Combined with https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/clipboard/ you get great productivity, especially when working on sys admin terminal kind of stuff

afhammad··on Rich Hickey on Clojure.spec (2022) [video]
This talk is from 2016, not 2022
afhammad··on UUIDs are popular, but bad for performance (2019)
https://livebook.manning.com/book/api-design-patterns/chapte...

Section 6.3.3 gets to the point about base32

afhammad··on How do you guys like your coffee?
Same. Found Aeropress to be the best balance of TTC (time to coffee!), consistency, flavour extraction and ease of cleaning. Also prefer freshly ground light roasts!

On the hunt for a good burr grinder that doesn’t break the bank.

afhammad··on Clojure Core
Some recent/notable examples:

https://roamresearch.com is built with Clojure(Script).

https://storm.apache.org was written in Clojure but more recently re-written in Java to encourage OS contribution

afhammad··on Ask HN: Does Clojure significantly increase your productivity? How?
Its not a magic bullet. It will take a while (possibly years, depending on how often you use it) before you can claim any productivity boost. It also depends on the nature of problems you use it for, for example its difficult to beat the productivity of Ruby on Rails for a CRUD heavy application (unless you invest in a setup that works for you upfront)

Things that will negatively impact productivity when you first start (assuming they are new to you)

- Unlearning the OOP way

- The LISP syntax

- Learning about all the core functions

- Functional paradigm

- Finding and learning the right libraries

- Structuring your code

- Tooling and Editor support (very much needed to be productive) and REPL workflow

- Context switching between Clojure and other languages

- Familiarity with the JVM ecosystem and Java error messages

Now that that’s out the way, many of the things I listed are the same things that contribute to Clojure’s productive reputation, once you get over the initial hump, which can take a while for some.

Additional things that only contribute to productivity:

- Well thought out data structures and use of the same set of functions (map, reduce, assoc, conj, etc.) to operate on them.

- Simpler and safer concurrency support

- The entire set of JVM libraries at your disposal, you don’t need to wait for a Clojure version.

- REPL driven development

- One language for the full stack if you want it

- Great interop with host languages (Java, JS)

Im probably forgetting a bunch of stuff but i’m typing this on my phone on the move.

afhammad··on Ruby on Rails in a week
Yeh, i'm going off London job market.
afhammad··on Ruby on Rails in a week
The market (job vacancies) seem to imply otherwise, I rarely see it mentioned in comparison to Python, Go, PHP.
afhammad··on Ask HN: What is your favorite ergonomic chair/desk
I used a Herman Miller Embody for years, great chair but surprisingly broke a lot (arm rests).

I now swear by the Humanscale Freedom w/ Headrest. Extremely comfortable (iv fallen asleep in it numerous times), sturdy (and heavy). The articulating headrest is a great feature (it keeps your head supported upright as you recline for better screen viewing). I’ve had my second hand one for 6 years now.

https://www.humanscale.com/products/seating/freedom-headrest...

afhammad··on Quay.io goes down for second time this month
previous outage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239517
afhammad··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2019)
Board Intelligence | London, UK | Senior/Lead Software Engineer, DevOps Engineer | Full time | Onsite (London) or Remote

The company:

We deliver Software as a Service for decision makers and boards. We’ve been helping boards to make better decisions for 14 years and we’ve been turning that knowledge into software for 6 years. We’re 50 people today and growing fast. As we grow, we’re fiercely protective of our friendly, high performing culture. We’re owner managed and remain in control of our own decision making and destiny.

https://www.boardintelligence.com

The stack:

We’re looking for people who know how to learn and how to think, we don’t require experience with any particular part of our stack. Our stack is also evolving. We’re early adopters of any technology that can help us deliver our product and we’re not afraid to change and to up-skill the entire team in a new area. Currently we use:

- Front-end: React, Redux, TypeScript

- Back-end & services: Ruby on Rails, Clojure, Go, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Google Protobuf

- Infrastructure, Devops and CI: Docker, Kubernetes, bare metal servers, Gitlab CI + AWS Lambda, Google Cloud.

The Details:

We pride ourselves on our great working environment and package. Here's some of what's on offer:

- Competitive salary & pension scheme

- Personal performance bonus

- Bupa health & dental cover

- Daily breakfast, drinks, fruit and snacks

- Regular training & development, mini MBA series, lunch & -learns

- Travel card loan & cycle to work scheme

- Competitive parental policies

We know there are a lot of great opportunities out there, so we don’t hang about. Our selection process takes less than a week.

Email me at: ahmad.hammad@boardintelligence.com

afhammad··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2019)
Board Intelligence | London, UK | Senior or Lead Software Engineer, DevOps, Full Stack | Full time | Onsite or Remote

The company:

We deliver Software as a Service for decision makers and boards. We’ve been helping boards to make better decisions for 14 years and we’ve been turning that knowledge into software for 6 years. We’re 50 people today and growing fast. As we grow, we’re fiercely protective of our friendly, high performing culture. We’re owner managed and remain in control of our own decision making and destiny.

https://www.boardintelligence.com

The stack:

We’re looking for people who know how to learn and how to think, we don’t require experience with any particular part of our stack. Our stack is also evolving. We’re early adopters of any technology that can help us deliver our product and we’re not afraid to change and to up-skill the entire team in a new area. Currently we use:

- Front-end: React

- Back-end & services: Ruby on Rails, Clojure, Go, Kafka, RabbitMQ

- Infrastructure, Devops and CI: Docker, Kubernetes, bare metal, Gitlab CI, Google Cloud.

We know there are a lot of great opportunities out there, so we don’t hang about. Our selection process takes less than a week.

Email me at: ahmad.hammad@boardintelligence.com

afhammad··on Quick, Draw
It says draw a leg, I draw a straight line and before i even finish drawing the line it guesses "leg". Not rigged. And the "toe" I drew could have easily been a finger or thumb but it seemed to be sure it was a toe.
afhammad··on Eve: Programming designed for humans
I was just listening to DHH's interview [0] on Tim Ferriss's podcast. On the question of beautiful code DHH said among other things "I open up any piece of code in Basecamp and it kind of reads like a great table of contents..." That immediately made me think of the work being done with Eve based on recent screenshots. Can't wait to try it out.

[0] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/10/27/david-heinemeier-hans...

afhammad··on Bret Victor, Inventing on Principle (2012) [video]
http://witheve.com
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