DHAHAB · Projects
Everything I've actually built.
Yusuf Gadelrab is a computer science student at San José State University (BS Computer Science, expected May 2028) who ships in public. Each project below has its own case study page — what it does, how it was built, and, where it applies, the result that went against him. Nothing here is a mockup with a made-up metric attached.
The academic side lives on the research page. This page is the engineering.
01 · AI & Automation
Systems that do the boring work
Built on local models wherever possible — no per-token bill, and the customer's data never leaves their machine.
FreightDesk AI
An AI back-office clerk for small freight brokerages. It reads the billing and accounts-receivable inbox, works out what each message actually is — a rate dispute, a missing BOL, a chase on an unpaid invoice — and drafts the reply, all on a local model so no customer data leaves the brokerage. Small brokerages lose hours a day to that inbox and cannot justify a full-time clerk for it; this is the shape of the problem an LLM is genuinely good at, provided you keep a human on the send button. Sold as a founding-client pilot at $999 setup plus $249/month, with a 3-day install.
HwyHaul LoadLink
An AI intake and accounts-receivable automation built during a freight-brokerage internship, covering 18 distinct finance workflows end to end. The design constraint that shaped everything: it had to run entirely on local models, at $0 in API cost, because freight paperwork is full of customer and carrier data that should not be posted to a third-party endpoint. 77 passing tests, because a finance workflow that is wrong 5% of the time is worse than no automation at all.
DIRA — security scanner
A security audit for startup codebases in one command: hardcoded secrets, dependency CVEs pulled from OSV.dev, configuration and infrastructure-as-code misconfigurations, dependency license risk, secrets buried in git history, and live TLS and header checks — ending in a startup security-readiness score. Written in Python with zero dependencies on purpose, because a security tool that drags in fifty transitive packages is expanding the attack surface it was hired to shrink. 37 passing tests, MIT licensed, with SARIF and SBOM output for CI.
EventReels
A local-first ffmpeg pipeline that takes raw event footage and returns a finished 9:16 highlight reel — cut detection, beat-aligned edits, captions, export — plus a browser studio to drive the whole thing without touching a command line. The interesting engineering is in treating ffmpeg as a compiler target: the studio produces an edit plan, the pipeline renders it deterministically, and the same input always yields the same reel.
02 · Trading research
Software built to disprove itself
Published with the results that failed. No live capital, no profit claims, none of it financial advice.
Swing Screener
A swing-setup screener sitting on top of a backtest engine written specifically to make lookahead bias impossible — signals can only ever see data that existed at signal time. Then it was pointed at its own headline result. Adversarial walk-forward validation invalidated most of the setups being traded: only the anchored-VWAP reclaim survived. Its original +0.23R over 101 trades then failed a second, harder re-test and was replaced by +0.117R over 4,933 trades on a 129-symbol, 10-year universe (95% CI +0.057 to +0.174). VCP came out breakeven; a gap and opening-range-breakout proxy came out at −0.28R and was dropped. The case study is the audit, not the strategy.
Broker-agnostic execution engine
An execution layer that treats a broker as a swappable adapter rather than the architecture. Deterministic order IDs and a claimed-before-every-call journal mean a crash mid-order is recoverable instead of ambiguous; reconciliation is idempotent, so replaying it can never double-fill. The risk layer fails closed by default, and a hard promotion gate refuses to connect a live broker until a paper track record clears a positive-expectancy threshold. 48 passing tests. It has never traded real money, and the gate is the reason.
03 · Product & design
Prototypes with an argument
Each one exists to test a specific product thesis, not to pad a portfolio.
EcoImpact
A community trash map paired with a quantified impact meter, so a neighbourhood cleanup produces a number instead of a vibe. FastAPI, SQLite and Leaflet, designed privacy-first from the schema up — location reports are the whole product, which makes deciding what not to store the central design decision rather than an afterthought.
SpartanEats
A student-run food delivery concept for San José State: campus-priced delivery from local spots, built by SJSU students for Spartans. The thesis is unit economics — the national delivery apps take a margin that only works at their scale, and a single dense campus with student couriers is exactly the market where a smaller operator can undercut them.
AU
A social feed with the outrage machinery deliberately removed: strictly chronological, no vanity metrics, no quote-posts, no verification hierarchy. Every one of those features exists to increase engagement, and every one of them is also the mechanism by which timelines get worse — so the prototype is an argument that you can subtract them and still have a usable product.
AURUM
A luxury super-app study: five product surfaces — retail, stays, cinema, dining and motors — running on one design system and one faceted search engine. The point is the shared substrate. Five verticals that look like five apps but are one component library and one query layer is the hardest thing to get right in a multi-surface product, and the easiest thing to fake in a mockup.
04 · Free tools
Client-side, no signup, no backend
Every one is a static page. No accounts, no telemetry — data stays in your browser's local storage.
Visa Navigator
A change-of-status and CPT/OPT planner for international students: a backward-planned I-539 timeline, conflict flags for the dates that quietly invalidate each other, and per-stage checklists. Built because immigration timing is a scheduling problem being solved by anxious people at 2am with twelve forum tabs open, and it runs entirely in the browser precisely because nobody should upload their immigration situation to a stranger's server.
Apply OS
A private tracker for internship, scholarship, grant and fellowship applications: a deadline radar that surfaces what is about to close, a kanban board for stages, and recommender tracking so a letter request never silently goes stale. It is the same system used on a real application season, not a demo of one.
Freight broker calculators
Six calculators freight brokers otherwise rebuild in a spreadsheet every quarter: rate per mile, deadhead cost, broker margin, detention, fuel surcharge, and break-even. No signup, runs in the browser, and each one shows the formula so it can be checked rather than trusted.
Risk toolkit
Position sizer, R-multiple and expectancy calculators, a Monte Carlo risk-of-ruin simulator, Kelly fraction, and break-even win rate. Built out of the trading research above, where the recurring lesson was that position sizing decides survival long before setup selection decides returns.
Offline PWAs — TradeLog, Cut, Fire
Three installable progressive web apps with no backend at all: TradeLog (an R-multiple trading journal), Cut (a weight tracker), and Fire (a daily ritual checklist). They install to a home screen, work with no connection, and store everything in local storage on the device. The full apps and projects index lives here too.
05 · Elsewhere
The rest of the work
Research
Two peer-reviewed SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2026 papers on computer science education, with methods and DOI.
Read the research →CODESWITCH
A free 8-week bilingual intro CS program for high schoolers still learning English, built out of that research.
See the program →Writing
Build logs and postmortems, including the ones about things that did not work.
Read the writing →Everything
One page listing every project, product, brand and app in one place.
See everything →Next step