Backend engineering · Testing
API integration tests: prove the contract without calling production
Use representative fixtures, strict outgoing-request assertions, deterministic clocks, and a narrow live smoke check to make API changes reviewable.
Technical writing
Notes on parsing, private AI, and computer science learning
Practical guides grounded in Yusuf Gadelrab’s work in freight intake parsing, CS tutoring, and bilingual computer science education.
Open source
Writing a secret-detection rule for gitleaks: what a pattern has to prove
How the Supabase token shape was established from evidence, why one key is deliberately not flagged, and what the false-positive tests pin down. The pull request is open and unmerged.
Build tooling
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH: why a build timestamp is a reproducibility bug
Deterministic SBOM timestamps, defining what counts as a valid value, and the test-isolation trap that appears the moment you read an environment variable.
Teaching
Tutoring computer science when the student is also learning English
Telling a language gap from a concept gap in ninety seconds, keywords as symbols, reading error messages by shape, and what the research does and does not support.
Search and SEO
The future of search engines: what AI changes about SEO, and what it does not
Zero-click data, retrieval versus ranking, structured data and entity identity, the llms.txt myth, and the crawler economics that will decide what the corpus contains.
Conference notes
Notes on a SIGCSE TS 2026 poster: what two hours at a poster board actually demands
What the poster format can and cannot carry, using the bilingual coding poster Yusuf co-authored as the worked example.
Developer tooling
Docker for CS coursework: reproducible environments without falling down the rabbit hole
When a container is worth it, a minimal Python and C++ setup, bind mounts, and the mistakes that cost an evening.
Databases
SQL joins and indexes: the parts that quietly change your answer
Why a LEFT JOIN plus a WHERE becomes an INNER JOIN, how NULLs break NOT IN, and when an index is ignored.
Backend engineering
Integrating third-party APIs: the failure modes that only appear in production
Timeouts, retries with jitter, idempotency keys, rate limits, pagination, and webhook verification.
Bilingual CS education
Bilingual computer science education starts by separating logic from language
A field guide for language-aware instruction, grounded in Yusuf’s ACM SIGCSE 2026 poster collaboration.
CS tutoring
A computer science tutoring guide for learning to explain, trace, and debug
Concrete study and debugging routines drawn from Yusuf’s tutoring work at SJSU since August 2024.
Freight intake automation
Designing a freight intake schema for messages that were never forms
How to preserve evidence, represent missing information, and build a reviewable intake workflow.
Academic recovery
Academic recovery in computer science: a practical reset
A candid, employer-safe guide to assessing a difficult term and building a sustainable recovery routine.
Programming learning
Learning programming across languages without treating syntax as the whole skill
A method for identifying transferable concepts, comparing syntax, and testing assumptions with small experiments.
Existing guide
Parsing unstructured freight messages into structured load data
How to combine normalization, deterministic patterns, constrained models, and human review.
Local-first document parsing
Run small language models where the data lives
A practical architecture for extracting useful fields from private client text without making a hosted model the default data path.
Related work
Research context and poster citation
Explore the ACM SIGCSE 2026 poster collaboration and Yusuf’s 2025 SJSU research presentation.
Bilingual programming
Programming syntax can be the barrier—not programming logic
A focused introduction to separating conceptual understanding from English-heavy programming notation.