About

Hi — I’m Haseeb Ahmad, a full-stack engineer based in Europe. I’ve spent the last several years building backends, APIs, and developer tooling for small teams and early-stage products. This blog is where I write down the things I wish I had read earlier, usually a week after I broke something in production.

What I work on

Day to day, I work across the stack — most often Python, TypeScript/Node, and Postgres, deployed on platforms like Vercel, Fly.io, and AWS. I’ve shipped REST and GraphQL APIs, background job systems, ETL pipelines, internal admin tools, and the occasional frontend with React, Vue, or Astro. Nothing here is academic: it’s the stack I’d actually pick on a Monday.

Why this blog exists

Most engineering posts online are either marketing in disguise or written by people who only ship to localhost. I wanted somewhere to write the boring, specific things — the Postgres lock that took down a Friday deploy, the API decision I regretted six months later, the migration we ran in three batches instead of one because we’d learned our lesson.

Every post here is written from real experience. When I quote a number, a query, or an error message, it’s because I actually saw it. When I’m unsure, I say so.

What you’ll find here

• Backend & databases — Postgres, schema design, migrations, query plans.
• Devops & deployment — CI/CD, env vars, redirects, the boring checklist that prevents 3 a.m. pages.
• API design — versioning, pagination, error shapes, idempotency.
• Workflow — Git habits, code review, reading unfamiliar codebases.
• Engineering as a job — hiring, take-homes, learning out loud.

I keep posts short enough to read on a coffee break but long enough to actually teach something. If a piece feels useful, the highest compliment is sending it to a colleague who would also benefit.

How I write

I draft most posts on a laptop in the evenings, often after running into the problem I’m writing about. I edit them the next day, when I can tell whether a sentence is honest or just sounds good. I use modern editing tools (including AI for outlining and proofreading) the same way I use a spellchecker — to ship faster — but every claim, story, and code sample is my own and reviewed by me before publishing.

About the site

This blog is built with Astro and Tailwind CSS, deployed on Vercel. Posts are written in Markdown, version-controlled in Git, and served as static HTML. No tracking beyond standard hosting logs and the cookies used by Google AdSense as described in the Privacy Policy.

Get in touch

If a post helped you, broke for you, or got something wrong, I genuinely want to hear about it. The fastest way is the contact page. For legal information, see the Impressum.