SalahMate
A product focused on prayer times, habits and circles.
I build software, products, and ideas worth shipping.
Software engineer, indie maker, and curious builder. I work on AI, backend systems, developer tools, and small products that solve real problems.
Currently building
Pico
A little AI buddy for your Mac: a local-first menu bar app powered by on-device Apple Intelligence. No account, no API key, no cloud.
BreakReminder
A quiet macOS menu bar app that nudges you to rest your eyes, built around the 20-20-20 rule.
About me
I'm a software engineer based in Sydney, Australia, with 7+ years of experience building backend systems and internet products. Right now I'm a Principal Software Engineer at Xref.
I've worked on systems used by hundreds of thousands of users, built data pipelines processing millions of records, worked across AWS and Python, and led engineering projects from idea to production.
But my favourite part of engineering isn't the job title or the technology.
It's building things.
I spend a lot of my free time experimenting with ideas, launching side projects, learning new tools, and occasionally turning a crazy idea into something real.
By the numbers
From the systems I've worked on.
- 7+ years shipping backend systems, since 2018
- 500K+ users on systems I built, mobile and web
- 4.5M records ingested via Scrapy
- 60% uplift on the recommendation engine, via AWS Kinesis
- 20+ clients on OpenEdX, 10k+ learners
- $500/mo saved moving a warehouse off Redshift
Philosophy
I like building the parts of software nobody notices until they break — the pipelines, services, infrastructure and systems underneath the product.
I care about clean code, but even more about the person who has to understand it at 2am. Good systems should be kind to whoever comes after you.
Selected projects
Now
- 🛠 Building small software products
- 🤖 Exploring AI agents and AI-powered products
- 🖨 Experimenting with 3D printing and physical products
- ✍️ Writing about things I'm building
- ☕ Trying to ship more than I plan
Updated October 2026
Writing
I write about building useful products, designing reliable systems, and learning through shipping. I write on my newsletter, byhaseeb on Substack; subscribe there to get new essays by email.
I used to write on Medium and don't post there anymore. Those earlier articles:
- Building a Scalable, Event-Driven Image Generation Notification System · 2025
- Rollout Control in Python: Build Your Feature Flag System · 2025
- A Complete Tutorial on LangChain: Building Language Model-Powered Applications · 2024
- From Junior to Senior: A Strategic Guide for Software Engineers · 2024
- Building an Expense Tracker Using Django · 2024
- Developing an API in Under 10 Minutes Using Django Rest Framework · 2024
- How I Built CodeChamps.io with ChatGPT as My Coding Companion · 2024
- How to Create a Bar Chart Race in Python · 2024
- What is a Database? · 2024
- How Instagram Stores Billions of Videos · 2023
Enjoyed something I've built?
I build small products, experiment with new ideas, and share what I learn along the way.
If something here was useful, you can support my work with a coffee.
Let's build something.
I'm always interested in interesting ideas, products, and technical problems.