Mosab Ahmad Ibrahim

Joining the Tour De Ricky 200km Ride: A New Adventure Awaits!

Unknown — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am beyond excited to announce that I will be participating in the Tour De Ricky 200km (approximately 125 miles) ride event in 2024! As a beginner, yet passionate cyclist, I have always been drawn to challenging myself and pushing my limits (whenever I got time away from my job and other responsibilities), and this event promises to be an unforgettable experience.

What is Tour De Ricky?</h2>
Tour De Ricky is an Audax event, part of Audax UK, a organization that promotes long-distance cycling events.
What is an Audax ride, you ask me? No better answer than what Audax UK's website itself has to say</a>, from which I quote:

An Audax ride - known internationally as a Randonnée - is a cycle ride that has to be completed within a set time limit, including any stops to eat or rest. In most cases, riders have to maintain a minimum speed of 15km/h (some particularly long or hilly rides have a slightly lower minimum speed) and importantly a maximum speed of 30km/h. That's a little under 10mph and 20mph in Imperial measures.
It's not a race and individual riders' times are not published; if you finish within the time limit, you've succeeded.
Riders are expected to be self-sufficient. That doesn't mean that you have to ride alone or that you can't call on the services of a village blacksmith to help weld your frame back together, should the worst happen, but you navigate for yourself and if you do have any mechanical problems along the way, it's down to you to sort them or get yourself home.
Some rides offer food along the way; more often, you'll be finding your own sources of fuel, from cafes and pubs to village shops and service stations.
Throw in the hills, the British weather and distances ranging from 50km to 1400km and what might have sounded like a simple bike ride becomes more of a challenge - one that is appealing to increasing numbers of cyclists year on year. </blockquote>
You can also watch this great video explaining what Audax is:
</iframe> </div>
The Tour De Ricky event in particular offers a range of routes, 50km, 100km, and 200km long in distance, but I have set my sights on the 200km challenge. This particular route promises a full day of excitement, with a mix of rolling hills, scenic countryside, and quiet roads.
The 200km Route: A Challenge Awaits</h2>
The 200km route is designed to test the rider's endurance and cycling skills. With a total elevation gain of 2,500 meters, I will need to be prepared for this ride, since it has been a long time with me out of the saddle, and in a relatively short period of time too (4-5 weeks). The route will take the riders through some of the most beautiful landscapes in the country, with picturesque villages, ancient woodlands, and stunning views of the surrounding countryside.
Why I'm Excited</h2>
I'm excited to join the Tour De Ricky 200km bike ride for several reasons.
Firstly, I love the sense of community that comes with participating in a mass cycling event that is not competitive in nature (i.e. it is not a race). I'm looking forward to meeting fellow cyclists, sharing stories, and making new friends.
Secondly, I'm eager to challenge myself and push my limits. Completing this event will be a huge achievement, and I'm excited to see how far I can push myself. Finally, I'm looking forward to the scenic route and the opportunity to explore new parts of the country.
Thirdly, I have participated in the 100km ride in 2022, and it is still my longest ride so far (~120km). I did not get back to the start within the event's time limit, and I even lost my Brevit! So it was not counted as a success in Audax UK records (although it is a huge success in my personal records), so I am determined to get to the finish line within the time limit this year.
Training and Preparation</h2>

While I'm excited, I'm also aware that this event requires careful preparation and training. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be putting in the miles, honing my cycling skills, and building up my endurance. I will be working on my bike, making sure it's in top condition, and preparing myself mentally and physically for the challenge ahead.
Above is a hand drawn/written training calendar that fits my current work schedule (with return to office et al), and hopefully I can manage to finish it. It is not enough, but it will have to do.
I also discovered that the ride day will be in one of my oncall shifts, so I will have to find a swap for that! :D
Conclusion</h2>
The Tour De Ricky 200km ride, if successful, will be my first Century Ride, a ride that is a 100 miles long, or more, and will be a dream come true for me. I have done a Metric Centry</a> before, also with Tour De Ricky. I'm excited to be part of this amazing event once again, to challenge myself, and to experience the thrill of long-distance cycling. If you're a fellow cyclist, I encourage you to join me on this adventure. Let's ride together and make some unforgettable memories!
Useful Links:</h2>

Tour De Ricky Website</a></li>
Tour De Ricky 200km Route</a></li>
Audax UK Website</a></li> </ul>

My First Ever Woodworking Project: The Moravian Workbench

Unknown — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For my first ever woodworking project I wanted to make a bench. A bench is an essential tool for a woodworker, and it is also an amazing project to learn from. After a LOT of time spent researching the type of bench I wanted to make, the Moravian Workbench was my favourite, so I went with it!

Started the project with a hand drawn sketch for the bench:

The design is a centuries old design called The Moravian Workbench that is portable. This can be knocked down moved and reassembled.

Everything was made with hand tools, with very few exceptions. Here is how the project looks now:

There is a room for improvement, but I am pretty glad with the output. Not too bad for a first timer.

My First Metric Century

Unknown — Sat, 21 May 2022 23:00:00 +0000

Today I finished my first metric century (a ride that is 100km or more)! Was riding in Tour De Ricky audax, and it was a challenging route for me. Took me 7 hours and 22 minutes of riding (10 hours if you include the cafe and rest stops) but I did it!

Distance: 119.8 km Elevation Gain: 1134 m Time: 7h 22m

Some lessons I learned from this ride are (in a very raw format, will iterate on them later):

I needed specific recommendations in regards to what to wear, and most resources talk guidelines, which is something you don't want for the first few rides. In order to be able to take a guideline, you need to have tried a few rides in different conditions first. I wanted specifics (like wear a bibshort if it 10 degrees celsius or above, etc). </li>

I definitely need more gears for those hills </li>

It was great knowing my FTP, as I could only finish the ride by actively trying to keep my power below the FTP especially on those hill.
3.1. That required better shifting for the gears, and that's something I have always heard, but never really understood
3.2. I also don't know if I was crossing the chains, will need to see
3.3. This is one of the areas that people might benefit from videos on how to change the gears and in what order just like car drivers have </li>

I DEFINITELY need to increase my FTP </li>

I was lucky that I did not have any punctures, or mechanicals, but it was assuring that I got tools with me </li>

The back bag probably shouldn't have been there (over worrying about the weather made me pack extra just in case) </li>

I probably should've taken the power bank. Phones almost died at the end </li>

I had a rear freehub that needs changing (there is play in the cassette) but there is nothing I could do about it, as the part was delivered right before the ride. Was afraid it fails on me during the ride, and paid extra attention not to put sudden impact on the drivetrain, luckily it didn't fail! </li>

Having the route on multiple devices was helpful </li>

Cycling navigation experience could use a lot of improvement. This is not a solved problem yet. </li>

Investing in a bike fit was one of the best things I did! Can't imagine doing this distance with the original bike setup I got! </li>

Servicing the bike, and changing the worn chain was also a contributing factor to minimise the risk of getting a mechanical, I guess! </li>

I should've planned the transportation to and from the start/finish point better! That cost me a late start, and because of that I ended up doing the whole route alone instead of doing it with a bunch of fellow colleagues, but that's ok. </li> </ol>

Here is a video about the ride:
</iframe> </div>

Joining Production Engineering at Facebook/Meta

Unknown — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000


Super excited and thrilled to share that I am joining the Production Engineering team at Meta/Facebook</a> in London! Today is my first day.
Production Engineering was created at Facebook to work with engineering teams and partners to champion the Reliability, Scalability, Performance, and Security posture of production services. PEs are hybrid software and systems engineers; they are the glue holding things together, whether that’s infrastructure and software or teams and processes.

The true power of Production Engineering comes from developing strong relationships with partner engineering teams and valuing collaboration and knowledge sharing to build technical expertise and community. PE’s write production code and solve hard problems in systems serving billions of people across Facebook, services like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, and in diverse infrastructure areas like machine learning/inference, storage, and networking.
If you still are trying to figure out what a production engineer does, watch this video</a>!
</iframe> </div>
Or you can watch this presentation at SRECon 2015 that talks about Production Engineering at Facebook and how it evolved:
</iframe> </div>
Can not wait to get starts on a journey of challenges, learnings and hyper growth!

About SRE with null++

Unknown — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I was the guest in one of my favourite podcasts in Arabic: "null++"</a>. It is my favourite for two reasons:

One of the two co-hosts is a dear friend of mine, and I hope I become friends with the other co-host as well. Both co-hosts are active in the tech scene in Egypt, and are very competent engineers.</li>
The podcast is a valuable resource for people in Egypt interested in the tech scene, especially new comers, to know not only the latest trends and best practices, but also have some guidance along the way to get there.</li> </ol>
Here is the link to Episode[42]: SRE with Mosab Ibrahim</a>.
If you have any feedback, or questions, please feel free to reach out</a> to me.

My First Podcast Appearance!

Unknown — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently received an invitation from my dear friend Ahmed Zain</a>, who runs a very interesting podcast under the name of "Tech and Coffee", that is generally made for sharing experiences around tech and, you guessed it, coffee!
This is the first time I participate in a podcast, and it was a humbling experience. We talked about many things; How I started in tech, how my career developed over time, what it means to be an SRE, my journey from Egypt to Germany, and finally the United Kingdom, as well as other topics. The podcast and the episode are in Arabic.
You can listen to it on any of the following links

Youtube</a></li>
Spotify</a></li>
Apple Podcast</a></li> </ul>

Joining Twitter SRE Team!

Unknown — Fri, 08 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000


Last Friday was my last day at GoCardless</a>. It has been a year -and change- full of knowing smart and great colleagues, and learning a lot from them. Special shout-out to the Core Infrastructure team!
I am super excited that starting next Monday I will be joining Twitter</a>'s Site Reliability Engineering team @TwitterSRE</a> in London! I have met some of the team already, and can't wait to start working with them and meet the rest!
This is a huge step for me, and I look forward to months and years of hard working, learning and making new friends while empowering everyone in the world to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers!

Top 10 Man Pages Every Linux Sys Admin Should Read

Unknown — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Came across an interesting question on Quora (A great question and answers website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by Quora's community, either factually or in the form of opinions).
The question was:

What are the top 10 man pages that most Linux administrators should read? </blockquote>
Intrigued by the question, I spent some time reading the answers, and there were great answers, but the question was inspiring. However, this was an opportunity for me to reflect on what man pages I found useful, and thought it might benefit others as well, so here is the answer I provided:
Almost forgot all about it, until someone shared my answer today on Quora, which made me share it here as well.
The answer goes as follows:
sake of argument, if I had to choose 10 man pages they would be: I agree with Jesse Pollard[^1], most linux administrators should read all of them once. However for the

man man</code>: understand how man</code> itself is organized, what the different man sections are and what they mean.</li>
man ps</code>: contains a lot of useful information about processes, their life cycles, and their states. Every linux system administrator should know how processes work in linux. The information here is handy in interpreting the output of other commands that include any information about processes running on the linux box you are maintaining/debugging.</li>
man find</code>: surprisingly, you can learn a lot about linux filesystems just by reading this (long) man page. Understanding this page helps you gain deeper levels of understanding. You will appreciate the output of commands like ls</code> much more when you do.</li>
man vmstat</code>: (if you don’t have vmstat</code> installed, get it installed, now!) vmstat</code> is extremely handy for gaining interesting insights into how different linux subsystems and the processes running on it are behaving. Study vmstat</code>’s different options; it will make your life easier.</li>
man iptables</code>: linux’s tool for IPv4 and Ipv6 filtration, as well as NAT.</li>
man ss</code>: a linux utitlity to investigate socket related stuff.</li>
man sar</code>: a utility to collect, report, and/or save system activity. Can prove useful in various areas of investigation.</li>
man iostat</code>: a utility that provides statistics about CPU, io devices and partitions.</li>
man strace</code>: traces system calls and signals that a process performs.</li>
man lsof</code>: a tool that lists open file descriptors for all processes. You can also zoom in on a single process using its pid</code>.</li> </ul> I think if an administrator masters those, anything else becomes that much easier.To read the rest of the answers, you can check the question on quora</a> [^1] Jesse Pollard's answer</a> to the question.
2018: State of the Union Unknown — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 The last year, 2018, has been a very busy year for me, I barely had a break! I am going to list what has been accomplished, and important milestones very briefly in the following few paragraphs. Work and Career</h2> Java in Production</h3> In November 2017, I joined an adtech company in Berlin, Germany to work on their ad delivery server which was written in PHP and used technologies like Nginx, MongoDB, and Redis. Most of the work was bug fixing, and little was about adding new features. The project quickly became very boring, and any attempt to enhance it, or refactor any part of it was rejected and foiled. Early last year, I switched to another interesting project that was being built from scratch. This time the project was built using the Java programming language, and the Vert.x framework was used. Later Spring framework was used for most of the microservices involved in the project. In both cases, this was my first time to develop, maintain and deploy Java code to production. Scalability</h3> Back in Egypt, the most traffic I have dealt with was around 100K requests per week! Looking to work on projects that handled large amounts of traffic was one of the main reasons I moved to Germany. The PHP project was handling 100K requests per hour, compared to the maximum I had in Egypt that was a big step forward. But the production footprint of the java project kept growing month over month till we reached a milestone of handling more than 1 billion requests per day. It was a very exciting journey, and I learned a lot from it in terms of teams, companies and systems scalability. The Year of The Good Reads</h3> This year, I started with a pledge to read 10 books on the annual Good Reads challenge. I ended up reading 18 books</a>! The books were mainly in the following areas Linux internals/kernel books</li> Data structures and algorithms</li> Python programming</li> Linux systems programming</li> Go programming</li> Java programming</li> A couple of non-fiction books, two of them about startups</li> </ul> One of the achievements I am particularly proud of is reading the entire "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud</a>" by Brendan Gregg, in a single weekend! New Personal Library</h3> Speaking of reading, one of the things that I really missed the most after moving out of Egypt is my personal library. I had to take only a small portion of it with me. But I managed to grow this portion into a little library over the past year and 2 months. I have expanded both the hard copy books, my Kindle book collection, and ebooks from other sources like Packt Publishing. The year of “Finished” Online Courses</h3> For the past few years, I have always started, but not finished, a lot of online courses and MOOCs. This year, however, I managed to start and actually finish more than 15 courses, on platforms like Stanford’s Engineering Everywhere</a>, PluralSight</a>, Educative</a>, Udemy</a>, and even some Youtube playlists for courses by MIT, Waterloo, & Carnegie Mellon universities. You can find some of the interesting ones listed on my homepage. It is worth noting that not all the courses on my resources page</a> I have finished yet, but I found interesting enough to share with others. Technologies and Skills</h3> In 2018, I have acquired some completely new technical skills/technologies, as well as worked on improving some existing ones. The list of new technologies include: Golang</li> Java</li> Spring Framework</li> Vert.x Framework</li> Terraform</li> MongoDB</li> Redis</li> Kafka</li> Aerospike</li> </ul> The technologies and skills I was keen on improving include: Linux internals, linux administration and linux troubleshooting</li> Python</li> PHP</li> Bash</li> Docker</li> Docker Swarm</li> </ul> PyPI Package</h3> Towards the end of 2018, I published a silly Python package: dir2html</a>. The package converts a folder of images, into an HTML album using a Bootstrap template. Here is an example of how it looks like after the album has been generated: Mosab’s Bitmoji Album</a>. There is a list of improvements and features to be added to the project, but they are not the top priority. Job Interviews</h3> Boy did I have tons of interviews in 2018! Before leaving Egypt, I was targeting to move to London, and if that didn’t work, I had Amsterdam as a backup plan. So in 2017, I did a lot of interviews for companies in both cities, as well as a couple of stray interviews for companies in other cities like Paris. When the first round didn’t yield a job offer in either, I started to believe that those companies required a significantly higher experience than I had at the time. The companies included Booking.com, Facebook, and Criteo Labs. Of course, all of them dealt with insanely high amounts of traffic and required a very deep understanding of more than just programming since I was also looking to switch to a Site Reliability Engineering role at the time. I have worked in startups most of my career and wanted to work with big companies, but it seemed I had to up my game first before trying again. In order to acquire this experience, I decided to start targeting companies in between and started looking into other geographical locations like Germany, until I landed a job at an adtech company in Berlin and worked on projects like the mentioned above. I set a goal for the year to see whether Germany would be where my family and I decide to settle. Turns out, Germany is not for me for reasons that can be detailed in another future post, maybe. With that conviction, I set on a new round of interviews again with Facebook, Booking, and other companies, Mainly in London and Amsterdam again. There was one exception of N26, an amazing bank of the future that is located in Berlin. I also had interviews with Google for the same role. The interview round yielded two offers, one from Booking, and one from a very promising fintech startup in London, which I accepted. Both offers were decent and choosing between them was a tough thing to do. I did not pass Facebook and Google interviews, but I did learn a lot. In particular, I was in a way better shape for the second facebook interview than the one I had in 2017, and I feel confident I am close to passing it. The Facebook interviews were for the Production Engineering role, which is -in the words of a dear Production Engineer & friend- a software engineer + a systems engineer + a networks engineer. Those interviews are really tough. But at the moment, I am preparing to move to London, finally! And as exhausting as the move is, even though we have not yet got the rest of the visas, it is also extremely exciting! IELTS Test</h3> As part of the visa process for the UK, I had to take an English language test, IELTS short for The International English Language Testing System. Ironically enough, I didn’t find a suitable appointment in Germany, and the version of the test that is approved by the UKVI (United Kingdom Visa and Immigration) is only conducted in Dusseldorf, Germany, which is a 4 hours trip, or a one hour flight from Berlin where I live. I looked for appointments in other cities, like Amsterdam, Paris, and London, since my short stay visa was still valid. I ended up taking the test in London. The score I got was an overall band of 7, which translates to a C1 level in the Common European Framework of Reference for languages, or CEFR for short. Not bad, I guess, but I hoped to score better. Most importantly, it satisfies the UK visa requirements, so I can improve that later. Personal Stuff</h2> Cities Visited</h3> In 2018, I visited London 3 times, twice for interviews, and once to take the IELTS exam. The city never ceases to amaze me. I am deeply in love with it. In one of the trips, I visited the Museum of Science where I saw parts of the Apollo mission -among other things- that was absolutely mesmerizing, had fish and chips at “Sherlock” restaurant in Baker Street, had Egyptian pies, and overall great times. There was also a magical weekend that was well spent in Vienna, Austria. A friend of mine was visiting another country in Europe, and we spontaneously agreed to meet in Vienna for a weekend. A friend of his was amazing and gave us shelter at his house, and took great care of us during the entire visit. During the 4 days trip to Amsterdam for the second interview at Booking, I took some time to meet some friends in Amsterdam. I also visited Haarlem since it is a popular residential place for families and met another friend living there who took me on a tour of the city. The Netherlands is always a delight to visit. First Tax Declaration!</h3> In Egypt, the situation is so messed up that many companies do not report the actual salaries of their employees in order to skip paying some of the tax and social insurance money. Since employees are not required, nor have the incentive to declare their income for tax purposes, most companies get away with it. Most of the companies I worked with were on the law-abiding side, but still, I personally did not have to declare my income for the tax authorities. This has changed in Germany. Last year was the first year I file my taxes, and I even got some refunds! The refunds didn’t last long as they were used to fund my family’s visit to Egypt a few months after they arrived in Germany, but still, that was a great thing to happen. First Fine!</h3> In the first few months, I was experimenting with public transportation tickets in order to decide what was best for me. I decided on the second month that I will start buying monthly tickets until I figured out how to move forward. One day, 3months into buying monthly tickets, I hopped into the underground, and a few inspectors boarded the train. When the inspector came to me, I pulled out my monthly ticket, the inspector looked at it and started speaking in German. I was confused. No inspector ever spoke before, except to maybe say "Danke schön", which mean "Thank you". Then I realized the ticket had expired THE DAY BEFORE! I had to pay a fine of 63 euros. That day I signed up for the annual card in order to avoid this situation in the future, and they charge my bank account every month without requiring me to intervene. New Laptop Sticker</h3> This year, I bought a new personal laptop, and of course, needed some stickers to decorate it. I bought some stickers from Sticker Mule and got others from meetups. I am happy with the current status, but I am looking forward to adding new stickers to the collections. Cooking Adventures</h3> The Germans have a really poor taste in food and most of the restaurants are “Germanized”, thus most of the food experience in Germany isn’t something to look forward to. Given that I finally started having some work/life balance, I started looking for recipes online and trying my luck with cooking. The majority of the recipes I cook come from Asian cuisines because I believe they know how to eat best. I spend a lot of time searching for a recipe that I can actually follow, which is an exhausting task, then it is easy getting the ingredients from the supermarkets around. Sometimes, I have to go to ethnic stores to buy specific spices or herbs, but overall the ingredients abundance situation is way better than it was back in Egypt. You can find some pictures of the recipes I cooked on my Instagram account</a>. Our Lovely Neighbours</h3> The first two months I was in Berlin, I was assigned a temporary guest house to stay in until I found a more permanent accommodation for my family and myself. A lot of friends recommended a company that rented furnished apartments, and after a few calls and emails which the HR helped me with, I got the apartment. At this point, my wife was still in Cairo. She was communicating with one of her friends who turns out lives in the same exact building we are moving into! That was such a great coincidence, and we had a great year together. They got our backs in countless occasions, often on short notice. Thank you, neighbours/friends! A Friend Visited from Egypt</h3> In 2018, my friend Osama visited me from Egypt as part of a Euro-trip he had. Unfortunately, we coudln’t spend as much time together as we hoped to because of all the interviews I had coinciding with the visit. Let’s see what the future holds. Amazing New Friends</h3> Throughout the past year, I got to know some amazing new friends. I also got to spend a lot more time with old friends I barely met back in Egypt. Some of them I got the privilege of working with them, either in the same company, or the same team. For that, I am ever thankful. I will miss them a lot after moving out. Adam, School and The German Language</h3> My son, Adam, was afraid at first not being able to speak German and how that will affect his relationship with his colleagues at school. Turns out, he learned the fastest of us all and became very fluent in German. He especially enjoys the playgrounds that seem to be everywhere in Berlin. That’s not the case in Egypt, where you have to buy very expensive memberships in exclusive clubs in order to have someplace for your kids to play. Adam acquired a lot of friends, and he is very happy at school. Health Adventures</h3> The year 2018 had a lot of health-related stories. I had a tooth removed, leaving a big gap in my mouth. I had a surgery to remove some extra skin that looked suspicious but turned out to be nothing serious. I also had my first ever ambulance ride when I suspected having a blood clot because I travelled to London a few days after the surgery. I was held in the hospital for a few hours but was cleared shortly after. But that’s nothing compared with the two times my daughter, Sofia, had us rush her into the ER. The first was a few days after they have arrived in Berlin, on the day we were supposed to register them. She fell off the bed and hit her head then threw up, which is a sign of a potential concussion. We immediately cancelled the appointment and went to the first hospital that appeared on Google maps. The second time was when she decided she wanted a just-poured cup of tea and grabbed it from the table very quickly leading it to spill on her arm. She got a second-degree burn that we are still treating, but she has passed the danger zone, and feels no pain, thank God! Overall, I admire the health care system in Germany and most European countries, although, sometimes you really have to wait to get some care. Chess!</h3> I started playing chess online</a>, after so many years of not doing so. I finished the year with a 900 score, and I intend to continue playing this year. New Year’s Eve Fireworks</h3> My family and I have attended two New Year’s Eve fireworks nights. Most people living in Berlin complain about how loud the noise is, but given that I have spent many days on the streets protesting in Egypt’s 2011 revolution, in the midst of real bullets fired at us, tear gas bombs, and other stuff, the fireworks noise wasn’t much to handle. Adam enjoyed it very much though both years. Sofia enjoyed it the first time but was absolutely terrified the second time that Amira had to stay home with her, while I accompanied Adam on the street. Things I Miss in Egypt</h3> A lot of my friends here kept telling me that by the end of the year I will miss Egypt again. Truth is, I have not. Not even a little. I only miss very few things there: My brothers, and few members of my family, and my wife’s family</li> A few friends from work and otherwise</li> A few restaurants</li> </ul> Many of my friends say the weather here is gloomy, but the weather here is one of the things I like, and of the reasons I moved here. I do not feel homesick, and I don’t think I will soon either. The Next Year</h2> We are only a few weeks into 2019, and a lot is going on already! My family and I are preparing to move to London where I will join a very promising fintech startup in the capacity of a Site Reliability Engineer. It is going to be a challenging yet an exciting year, and I hope it goes well without any unwanted surprises. I am excited! How To Install Firefox On Debian Jessie Unknown — Tue, 10 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 Iceweasel is great, but I prefer Firefox. A while back I decided to go back to my favorite linux distribution, Debian. The current stable release of Debian is code named Jessie, and this is what I have installed on my laptop at the time of writing this post. Mozilla has three famous desktop applications. Those applications are Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey. But Debian has been shipping those products re-branded as Iceweasel, Icdeodove, and Iceape, respectively. Debian does this as a workaround for some incompatibilities between the Debian Free Software Guidelines and Mozilla’s trademark usage policy, and I think something related to the Mozilla logos licensing as well. I am not aware of the details of the conflicts, and I would like to read about it some other time. For now, I wanted to install Firefox instead of, or alongside, Iceweasel on my laptop. Iceweasel is great, but I was having a few problems. One example would be the different User Agent information, which causes some problems while using services on the internet, like Medium. Medium does not recognize my browser to be supported, and thus disables the option of writing stories if I am browsing it using Iceweasel. I did a quick Google search on how to install Firefox on Debian Jessie, and a majority of the results suggested adding repositories from Ubuntu packages hosted on Sourceforge. I had two major problems with that: Problem 1: I don’t like Sourceforge. At all. For various reasons, but that’s a story for another time. Problem 2: I don’t like the idea of adding the repositories of another distro to my current setup. Does not seem like a neat solution. So I kept searching until I found this “Debian Mozilla team”</a> page. I knew I found my desired solution. Below are the steps I followed from that page to get Firefox installed on Debian Jessie. Step 1: Add Mozilla Archive to APT Repositories</h2> Open a terminal as root, and add a new file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/</code> directory: touch /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-mozilla.list </code></pre> Open the file using your favorite text editor, mine happens to be vim, and add the following line to it: deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ jessie-backports firefox-release </code></pre> Step 2: Add the Mozilla Archive Key</h2> This line adds mozilla.debian.net</code> archive to your list of archives. Since the packages at mozilla.debian.net</code> are signed, running apt-get update</code> now will spit out a key not found error. To add the key you need to download the pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring</a> package, and install it. The package requires that debian-keying</code> package be installed. cd ~/ wget mozilla.debian.net/pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring_1.1_all.deb dpkg -i pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring_1.1_all.deb </code></pre> Step 3: Install Firefox</h2> Now it is time to update the archives and install Firefox: apt-get update apt-get install -t jessie-backports firefox </code></pre> And now you have Firefox installed. Note that Iceweasel is also still installed, and they both will use the same settings and configurations. When I started Firefox, it had all the add-ons and settings and even the tabs that were opened in Iceweasel, all preserved. Check the mozilla.debian.net</a> page for various combinations of Debian release, Mozilla desktop application you want to install, and the version of the Mozilla desktop application you want installed. New Version of Power Close Unknown — Mon, 09 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000 New website, new icon, and improvements for the tab addict Firefox add-on A Brief History</h2> I have recently noticed that Power Close, my Firefox add-on, has reached a 1.5 K downloads milestone, which is way more than what I anticipated when I first created it. It was a very small hack for a very personal itch I have, and I never thought this many people had the same problem. The first version published version, 0.2.1, was officially released on September 28th, 2014, on Mozilla’s add-on portal, and a couple days before that on GitHub. A few bug fixes and little improvements were released since that date, and then I got busy with my life and work. What’s New</h2> Earlier this month, a new version 0.5.2 of the add-on was released. Here is a quick overview of the changes that took place. New Icon</h3> In older versions of the add-on, the logo used to be one of the icons designed by Freepik</a> from Flat Icon</a>, that was licensed under CC-BY License</a>. In this release, the icon used for the logo and the toolbar button is a mash of two icons from Google’s Material Design Icons</a> that are published as an open source project under the CC-By License</a>. Selection Context Menu Option</h3> In previous versions of the add-on, the user had to click in a non-interactive part of the page to see the "close all tabs from this domain" context menu item. This caused usability issues because the option didn’t appear if you right click on the page while having a portion of the text selected. Now the same option is added to the “Selection Context Menu”, so now the user can still find this option in the context menu even if they have previously selected some text. Switched to The New Firefox Add-on SDK</h3> The previous versions of the add-on were developed using the now deprecated “cfx” sdk provided by Mozilla for Firefox add-on developers. This new version is updated to make use of the new SDK named “jpm”. New website</h3> I have also registered a domain name for the add-on, and moved it from the sub-domain under my personal website power-close.mos3abof.com, where it used to live, to power-close.com</a>. The website was given a face lift to make it more usable, but this is an early release with new enhancements and features in the backlog. The website is hosted on Dreamhost</a>, and is HTTPs enabled using a certificate issued from Let’s Encrypt</a>. Newsletter</h3> I am also starting a newsletter for a better channel of communication with the users, where I consider it a matter of principal not to spam the subscribers with unnecessary emails. You can sign up for the newsletter on the website: power-close.com</a>. Social Media Presence</h3> I have also started a Facebook page</a> and created a Twitter account</a> for the add-on. What’s Next</h3> The downloads number has really caught me by surprise, mainly because I have not put any effort to marketing it. This inspired me to dedicate more effort into the project to make it more useful for the ones who are already using it. This also inspired me to launch a side experiment by reading and learning about growth hacking, while applying what I learn on Power Close, and documenting my findings along the way. I am still not 100% sure about the game plan for this experiment. If you have any tips, hints, or advice I would love to hear/read it. Or you can click on the button below and add Power Close to your firefox browser now! </a> Power Close, My First Firefox Addon Unknown — Sun, 28 Sep 2014 12:00:00 +0000 I open a lot of tabs on firefox, and I mean A LOT! I was searching for addons to help me close tabs as fast as I open them so that I would keep the rate of open tabs steady. The best I found was something that closed duplicate tabs. I usually have a lot of tabs from the same domain name open most of the time when I am researching something, or even when I am surfing facebook. So I thought it would be cool if I could close tabs belonging to a specific domain name, and not just duplicate. I didn't find it, so I created it. Pretty basic, no optimization whatsoever, but here it is</a> and here is the code</a>. I submitted it yesterday for review by Mozilla, and today I got an email stating that the addon has undergone full review :) How to use it</h2> After installation, this icon will appear as a button in your browser: Press on it, and an input field will appear. Write the keyword or domain name in it and press enter, and voila! What’s next for "Power Close"</h2> There are a couple of ideas for future features : Context menu shortcut: Adding a context menu entry to close all tabs from current selected tab’s domain Autocomplete: I am planning on implementing autocomplete so you don’t have to type full domain names. List current open domains: a feature to list currently open domain names listed by the count of open tabs from every domain in a descending. IDN domain names support: currently the addon does not support domain names using non English letters and numbers. I am planning on adding this support at some point or another. Other closing options would be thought of as well. Feel free to suggest ideas. Heading For The Dark Ages! Unknown — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 04:00:00 +0000 [tl;dr? Check the graph at the end of the post] </blockquote> In Egypt we are having an electricity crisis. It started in Mubrak's presidency, the dude ousted by the great Jan 2011 Revolution. After his removal, the crises started to deepen. Morsi came to office as the president in the elections right after the revolution, and in his rule the crisis took an even worse turn. It became normal that electricity cuts off once a day for an hour. That was one of the main reasons people revolted against Morsi, and the military seized the opportunity and removed him from office and put the supreme court's president in his place for a year. Power outages were slightly improved right after ousting Morsi, but then it gradually was becoming worse and worse. Marshall Sisi won the next presidential elections, he is the current president of Egypt and now we are having 5 or more power outages a day!!! This dude is a bloody savage and a mass murderer and if there was any justice in the world he would be considered a war criminal, but that's a story for another time! Anyway, things were getting a lot worse without any government official having a shred of decency to come up and talk to the people about it. Not an apolgy, or a bit of information of how bad and/or how long will this go on. Not a statement on whatever measures the government put in place to solve this. Not a thing!! Then I saw this post</a> by my fried Tarek Amr</a>. He wrote that the Egyptian Electric Utility and Consumer Protection Regulatory Agency (EGYPTERA) has released an online meter to show the current load status on the Egyptian power grid. He said that the meter did not provide any way to be processed programmatically, like an API, and he invited his fellow programmers to try and do so. I liked the idea very much, and worked on a web application</a> that parses the meter data and provides it as an API</a> for other programmers to use, and open sourced the code</a>. Unfortunately, EGYPTERA's load meter only shows if the power is in the "Safe Zone", "Warning Zone" or "Danger Zone". It also shows the load distribution throughout the day's hours. It does not show any historical data. It does not show location specific load status. Just a load status on the entire power network across Egypt!! After I released the api, I worte another script that used that api to save the status into a database on my online server withe a timestamp. I collected data for the past 7 days and a half about the load status every 10 minutes. When I plotted it using D3js, the output was scary! Each row represents a day, and every block stands for an hour of the day starting at 12 am and finishing at 12 am the next day. Load level has a value of three : Danger (represented in red)</li> Warning (represented in yellow)</li> Normal (represented in green)</li> </ol> You can reach the load distribution graph here</a>. We were heading for the "Dark Ages" figuratively with all that blood spilled and corrupted governments, corrupted military, corrupted judicial system, corrupted police and corrupted media. Now were are heading for the Dark Ages, LITERALLY!! Update 1: The application has been featured on a TV show on Alnahar Alyoum channel. Ironically the name of the channel means "The Day Light Daily" while we are in a power crisis. Here is the video link</a>. I have been called by the program on phone from minute 17 to minute 27. Update 2: The application now has been moved to its own domain name (www.gridstatusnow.com) and has been undergoing some UI enhancements for a better user experience. My Sublime Text 2 Setup Unknown — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:53:00 +0000 I have been suffering for a while with IDEs, and ventured out to see what options do I have. I ended up using mainly Vim and Sublime for a long while now, and my life was never easier and I was never happier! In this post however I am talking about my Sublime Text</a> Setup. 1) Package Control</h3> You don't know what sublime is really capable of until you install the "Package Control</a>". The website describes it as: A full-featured package manager that helps discovering, installing, updating and removing packages for Sublime Text 2. It features an automatic upgrader and supports GitHub, Bitbucket and a full channel/repository system. </blockquote> If you are using Sublime and not using it, STOP READING & NOW GO INSTALL IT</a>! After that go have a look how to use it</a>. 2) The packages I use</h3> I have a list of awesome packages I use: SublimeLinter : Uses "lint" programs to highlight lines of code the linter deems to contain (potential) errors. It also supports highlighting special annotations (for example: TODO) so that they can be quickly located.</li> SideBarEnhancements : Adds lots of enhancements to default Sublime Text sidebar. Files and folders.</li> GitHubinator : Allows you to select text in a Sublime Text 2 file, and see the highlighted lines on GitHub's remote repo, if one exists.</li> Git : Plugin for some git integration into Sublime Text.</li> Djaneiro : Django support for Sublime Text.</li> SublimeCodeIntel : Full-featured code intelligence and smart autocomplete engine.</li> PHP-Twig : Adds support for .twig</code> template files.</li> BracketHilighter : Matches and highlights a variety of brackets for better readability.</li> SublimeRope : Adds Python completions and some IDE-like functions to Sublime Text.</li> jQuery : Provides help with jQuery functions.</li> Xdebug : Xdebug Interface for Sublime Text.</li> SublimeREPL : Helps you run an interpreter inside Sublime Text for various languages (like Python, Ruby, Shell) and you can configure it to run others as well.</li> </ul> To install any of these packages -after installing the Package Control- press ctrl+shift+p</code> then type install package</code>. A list will appear with all available packages to your, just click on the package you want and voila! I highly recommend you watch this video on Youtube : Perfect Workflow in Sublime Text 2</a>. It might seem very long, but it is actually divided into 10 minutes chunks -more or less- and it is one of the best resources I have seen about Sublime. Happy hacking/coding with Sublime :) Toggl Target: An Open Source Project of My Own Unknown — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 04:00:00 +0000 At our company, Yubb Software</a>, we track our working hours using the great time tracker created by the folks at Toggl</a>, and we have monthly goals that we need to achieve. I have always had a problem with time management, and this time I decided I should start working on them. So I created this small project to calculate how many more hours I should work to achieve my monthly goals. This is how the output of this script looks like : Hi Checking Internet connectivity... Internet seems fine! Trying to connect to Toggl, hang on! So far you have tracked 120.00 hours Business days left till deadline : 7 Total days left till deadline : 10 Required working hours for this month : 170 To achieve the minimum : you should log 4.00 hours every business day or log 3.00 hours every day To achieve the required : you should log 7.00 hours every business day or log 5.0 hours every day So far you have achieved: 70.59% [=================================================--------------|------] </code></pre> This information has provided me with a whole new level of awareness of how productive I am! It is scary, but at the same time it gives you a great indicator of how good -or bad- you are sticking to your goals and if you need to have some crunch time or just relax the next weekend. I then published the script under GPL license V2 on Github</a>. I got great deal of help from one of my role model software engineers in Egypt, Mohammed Tayseer</a>, making the code more Pythonic. He also added installation instructions for Windows users, as I don't use windows anymore, and he is now a contributor to the repository on Github. Today, Monday June 17th, Toggl added a link to my script on their new documentation in the Code Examples</a> section. My little open source script that uses is the first -and so far the only- mentioned project in their new API Documentation. Check it on their API Documentation</a> on Github, or check the following screenshot : My little open source script that uses is the first -and so far the only- mentioned in Toggl's API new Documentation.</a> This really made my day. Thank you Toggl :) Update 1 : Friday June 21st, 3:50 PM</h3> I received an email today from someone with the following content : Hi Mosab, I’m currently making a small Python app that interacts with the toggl API, and your toggl target script has been helpful in getting me started. I’m using a modified version of your api.py file, and I’d like to credit you in my project when I put it on GitHub, but I’m not sure how (I’m rather new to all of this). Is it sufficient to mention that in the readme or should I leave the line "#@author Mosab Ahmad [mosab.ahmad@gmail.com][]" at the beginning of the file? If you’re interested, it’s an implementation of this</a> (percentile feedback) Best </blockquote> I am really glad my code helped someone :) Update 2 : Wednesday Jul 10th, 11:43 PM</h3> Seems that my little Toggl Target script is picking up some momentum. I got this email 45 minutes ago : hi, you probably have already seen it, but i forked your toggl_target repo. i just wanted to see how fast i could add reports api support and what data comes out of there... while doing that i replaced the way the config is loaded to something similar like django works and loading a config file directly from a user's home dir... and added a setup.py to install everything. so now there is a separate script to get some reports and an api wrapper for reports subclassing yours. i also did a little refactoring in your code. since you seem to plan on writing a separate pytoggle lib i thought some of that is useful for you... so i wanted to give you an overview of what i changed and let you know, i probably won't do anything more with that. here is the sauce: https://github.com/fdemmer/toggl_target</a> regards, Florian </blockquote> I am really surprised and humbled by all your contributions, thank you. Joining Yubb Software Unknown — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:00:00 +0000 I am very excited to join Yubb Software</a>, a brilliant software development company. I have worked with the founders and some of the workers there in previous companies, and I love this group. The project we are working on is challenging, and the role I am supposed to play is very interesting. They are working from a co-working space called The District</a>, which is even more cool :) I am looking forward for a bunch of hard working months to come. Reading Data from Excel Sheets in Python Unknown — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:18:00 +0000 On May 22nd 2012 I was approached by the official campaign of the presidential candidate "Abolfotoh</a>". They needed help setting up a Google App Engine application. It was an interactive map that uses Google Maps to plot data about voters and polling stations. What they wanted further was to create another application to collect data from their official representatives on the ground and use this tool to feed the Google App Engine application with data. The application was originally created by "Espace</a>" -an awesome Egyptian company- and published on Google Code</a>. I helped the official campaign with the setup on Google App Engine, but that is another story. Before running the project in production, we needed to import a lot of data about the polling stations and the voters, like the Governorate it belonged to, the city, the number of voters per every station, the police station it belongs to, address, etc. This data was only available in an excel sheet so I had to find a quick programmatic way to import it. For the sake of simplicity, lets assume the data in the excel sheet was formatted like this : +-------------------+------------+------------------------+ | Polling Station | City | Total Number of Voters | +-------------------+------------+------------------------+ | polling_station_1 | Cairo | 7734 | +-------------------+------------+------------------------+ | polling_station_2 | Giza | 13332 | +-------------------+------------+------------------------+ | polling_station_3 | Alexandria | 10901 | +-------------------+------------+------------------------+ </code></pre> As in most spreadsheets, the first row is the header row that describes the data, and the actual data is in the rows to follow. I did a quick search and found several libraries that deal with excel in Python, there is even a website dedicated to listing them http://www.python-excel.org</a>. I chose to go with XLRD</a>, and you can find it in PyPi</a> as well. We need to install it first by running this command : pip install xlrd </code></pre> Or easy_install xlrd </code></pre> Let's start coding. XLRD calls the whole excel document a "Workbook", to open it we can do the following in an interactive python shell from the same path as the file: >>> from xlrd import open_workbook book = open_workbook('data.xls') </code></pre> Now we can manipulate the excel document using this "book" object we created. Remember the book has all the document. An excel document can have one or multiple sheets inside it that hold the data. The first sheet has an index of 0, the second has an index of 1 and so on. To open the first sheet which holds the sample data above we do this: >>> first_sheet = book.sheet_by_index(0) </code></pre> Now we are ready to manipulate the sheet, get information about it and extract data from it. For example to know the number of "effective columns" in the sheet we can print the ncols</code> attribute of the sheet, or to know the number of "effective rows", the rows that contain data, we can use the nrows</code> attribute. >>> print first_sheet.ncols 3 >>> print first_sheet.nrows 4 </code></pre> We now know how many rows contain actual data in the first sheet of our excel document. Time to loop over the rows and extract data. >>> for i in range(1, first_sheet.nrows): row = first_sheet.row_slice(i) station = row[0].value \ city = row[1].value voters = row[2].value print "Polling Station :{} in {} has {} voter".format(station, city, voters) Polling station polling_station_1 in Cairo has 7734.0 voters Polling station polling_station_2 in Giza has 13332.0 voters Polling station polling_station_3 in Alexandria has 10901.0 voters </code></pre> In the previous snippet of code we started to loop over the rows skipping the first row range(1, first_sheet.nrows)</code> Then we sliced every row out of the sheet with row_slice()</code> and then accessed it by column index to extract data from columns row[]</code>, and then we accessed the value of the cell by calling the row[].value</code>. This is a very simple usage of the library, I suggest you read its documentation, you will find many great stuff : >>> import xlrd help(xlrd) help(xlrd.sheet) </code></pre> Finally check my answer on a question about the issue on StackOverflow</a>. That's it for now! Poor Man's Guide: Monitoring a Website Using Python Unknown — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:34:00 +0000 In one of the projects I am working on there was a problem with Apache server. It went down almost on a daily basis, and we were reading the logs to get the bottom of the root cause. But until we got our solution we needed to monitor the server's accessibility through the web, and get alerted if it went down, and ultimately restart it when this happened. So I fired up my console and text editor and started hacking a little script to do the above mentioned side goals. Monitoring the Apache server's accessibility from a different server.</li> SSH the linux box running the server and restarting Apache.</li> Alerting the DevOps team about the issue.</li> Putting it all together</li> Setting up a cron job to run the script</li> </ol> I am assuming you are running an Ubuntu machine. Monitoring the Apache Server</h2> I was confused between two Python 2.x</code> libraries (note that they are dramatically changed in Python 3.x</code> and choosing between them is subject to different criteria). The first library was python-httplib</code> and the second was urllib</code>. After a quick reading through both library's manual and a quick reading on StackOverflow I have decided to go for urllib. Basically what I had in mind was to send a GET request to the website served by Apache and check the HTTP response code I got. If it is 200 -which is the SUCCESS response code according to HTTP standards- then everything is fine. You can try this in a python interactive shell : >>> import urllib response_code = >>> urllib.urlopen("http://www.example.com").getcode() print response_code 200 </code></pre> If the printed value is 200 then the website is up and running, if it has a different value or raises an Exception then the site is likely down (Assuming you have internet connectivity, no firewalls blocking your way, etc). Time to put it together in a script : 1</td> import urllib </td></tr> 2</td> </td></tr> 3</td> try: </td></tr> 4</td> response_code = urllib.urlopen("http://www.example.com").getcode() </td></tr> 5</td> if response_code != 200: </td></tr> 6</td> raise ValueError </td></tr> 7</td> except: </td></tr> 8</td> pass # Here write code to do whatever you want to do when the website is down. </td></tr></tbody></table></code></pre> Restart the Apache server remotely</h2> There is a wonderful Python library and a command-line tool called Fabric</a> that helps you streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It is ideally used to automate tedious error prone tasks in an easy way. You can read about more about it in their documentation. Install it by running the following command: sudo apt-get install fabric </code></pre> We now need to create a new python file that I will name fabfile.py</code>, you can name it anything, but let's just follow the common name you will see in Fabric's documentation. 1</td> from fabric.api import env, sudo </td></tr> 2</td> </td></tr> 3</td> env.hosts = ['user@server'] env.passwords = {'user@server' : 'password'} </td></tr> 4</td> </td></tr> 5</td> def restart_apache(): </td></tr> 6</td> sudo("apache2ctl restart") </td></tr></tbody></table></code></pre> We start by importing what we need from Fabric. Then we tell it some information about the server we want to restart Apache on by setting the env.hosts</code> and env.passwords</code> variables. Then we define a restart_apache</code> function that we will call later to do the actual restart. There are three main functions that are used the most, local()</code> that runs local commands, run()</code> that runs commands on the remote server and sudo()</code> that runs commands on the remote server using sudo</code>. Since Apache restart requires a root user or sudo privileges we used the sudo()</code> function. To run a Fabric script open up your terminal and run the following command: fabric fabfile.py restart_apache </code></pre> If you want to run it from a different directory than the fabfile.py</code> then you need to use the -f</code> option like this : fabric -f /path/to/your/fabfile.py function_name </code></pre> Alerting the DevOps team about the issue.</h2> We can re-use the email function from the previous post on this blog Installing Gdata Python Client on Dreamhost</a>: import smtplib from email.MIMEMultipart import MIMEMultipart from email.MIMEBase import MIMEBase from email.MIMEText import MIMEText from email import Encoders subject = 'Your website is down' email_body = 'Your website is down' gmail_user = 'YOUR-GMAIL-ADDRESS' gmail_pwd = 'YOUR-GMAIL-PASSWORD' recipient = 'DEVOPS-EMAIL' def mail(to, subject, text, gmail_user, gmail_pwd): '''Sends mail using gmail''' msg = MIMEMultipart() # Setting up message data msg['From'] = 'DEVOPS-EMAIL' msg['To'] = to msg['Subject'] = subject msg.attach(MIMEText(text)) # Opening the connection with Gmail SMTP server mailServer = smtplib.SMTP("smtp.gmail.com", 587) mailServer.ehlo() mailServer.starttls() mailServer.ehlo() mailServer.login(gmail_user, gmail_pwd) # Actual sending of the email mailServer.sendmail(gmail_user, to, msg.as_string()) # Closing the connection # Should be mailServer.quit(), but that crashes mailServer.close() </code></pre> Putting it all together</h2> I have combined all the snippets mentioned above, modified them and added some logging functionality to it. I have it installed on /opt/fabfile.py</code> and I have created a /opt/fab_logs</code> folder to hold the log files. Here is a gist with the complete script:

Useful Links:</h2>

Tour De Ricky Website</a></li>
Tour De Ricky 200km Route</a></li>
Audax UK Website</a></li> </ul>

Personal Stuff</h2>

A Friend Visited from Egypt</h3>
</p>
In 2018, my friend Osama visited me from Egypt as part of a Euro-trip he had. Unfortunately, we coudln’t spend as much time together as we hoped to because of all the interviews I had coinciding with the visit. Let’s see what the future holds.</p>

Chess!</h3>
I started playing chess online</a>, after so many years of not doing so. I finished the year with a 900 score, and I intend to continue playing this year.</p>

Mosab Ahmad Ibrahim

Joining the Tour De Ricky 200km Ride: A New Adventure Awaits!

My First Ever Woodworking Project: The Moravian Workbench

My First Metric Century

Joining Production Engineering at Facebook/Meta

About SRE with null++

My First Podcast Appearance!

Joining Twitter SRE Team!

Top 10 Man Pages Every Linux Sys Admin Should Read

2018: State of the Union

Work and Career</h2>

How To Install Firefox On Debian Jessie

New Version of Power Close

What’s New</h2>
Earlier this month, a new version 0.5.2 of the add-on was released. Here is a quick overview of the changes that took place.</p>

Power Close, My First Firefox Addon

Heading For The Dark Ages!

My Sublime Text 2 Setup

Toggl Target: An Open Source Project of My Own

Joining Yubb Software

Reading Data from Excel Sheets in Python

Poor Man's Guide: Monitoring a Website Using Python

Mosab Ahmad Ibrahim

Joining the Tour De Ricky 200km Ride: A New Adventure Awaits!

My First Ever Woodworking Project: The Moravian Workbench

My First Metric Century

Joining Production Engineering at Facebook/Meta

About SRE with null++

My First Podcast Appearance!

Joining Twitter SRE Team!

Top 10 Man Pages Every Linux Sys Admin Should Read

2018: State of the Union

Work and Career</h2>

Personal Stuff</h2>

A Friend Visited from Egypt</h3> </p> In 2018, my friend Osama visited me from Egypt as part of a Euro-trip he had. Unfortunately, we coudln’t spend as much time together as we hoped to because of all the interviews I had coinciding with the visit. Let’s see what the future holds.</p>

How To Install Firefox On Debian Jessie

Step 3: Install Firefox</h2> Now it is time to update the archives and install Firefox</em>:</p>

New Version of Power Close

What’s New</h2> Earlier this month, a new version 0.5.2 of the add-on was released. Here is a quick overview of the changes that took place.</p>

Power Close, My First Firefox Addon

Heading For The Dark Ages!

My Sublime Text 2 Setup

Toggl Target: An Open Source Project of My Own

Joining Yubb Software

Reading Data from Excel Sheets in Python

Poor Man's Guide: Monitoring a Website Using Python

A Friend Visited from Egypt</h3>
</p>
In 2018, my friend Osama visited me from Egypt as part of a Euro-trip he had. Unfortunately, we coudln’t spend as much time together as we hoped to because of all the interviews I had coinciding with the visit. Let’s see what the future holds.</p>

What’s New</h2>
Earlier this month, a new version 0.5.2 of the add-on was released. Here is a quick overview of the changes that took place.</p>