Notes
A collection of notes on engineering, architecture, leadership, and things I'm learning.
Recent
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Rabīʿ al-Awwal: The Coming of the Beloved ﷺ
In the year the elephant fell, a light rose over the sands of Makkah — and the mercy the worlds had been waiting for walked among them at last. The year the wo…
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Raft from scratch, part 1: leader election & beating split-brain
For two weeks I’ve had a single server. This week I gave it siblings — and hit the oldest problem in distributed systems: how do a bunch of equal machines, with…
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Building a Bitcask-style storage engine from scratch
A database is only as trustworthy as the layer that actually puts bytes on disk. So I started my distributed-systems build at the very bottom — before any netwo…
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Exactly-once is an illusion: at-most-once RPC with session dedup
Last week I built a storage engine that survives a crash. This week I put it behind a network — and the network immediately started lying to me. A client sends …
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The Tasbih That Outlived Kings
A daughter’s tired hands, a father’s gentle refusal, and thirty-three whispered words that have travelled through fourteen centuries of believing hearts. Sayyi…
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The Whisper That Made Fatimah Cry and Smile
Two whispers from the Beloved of Allah ﷺ into the ear of his daughter — one that filled her eyes with tears, and one that filled her face with light. In the fi…
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The Bedouin in the Mosque
A rough stranger, a defiled corner of the mosque, and a Prophet ﷺ who taught with kindness where others would have taught with the sword. The mosque of the Mes…
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The Boy and the Bird
A small boy, a small bird, and the Beloved of Allah ﷺ stopping the affairs of the world to sit beside a child’s grief. In the alleys of Madinah there lived a l…
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Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal during the Mihna
Chains upon the wrists of a single scholar — and the ʿaqīdah of an entire ummah resting upon his silence. In the early third century of the Hijrah, a dark tria…
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Imam Abdul Qadir al-Jilani and the Truth
A young traveller, a caravan of robbers, and forty gold coins sewn into a coat — the seed of a saint who would guide the ummah for centuries. He was a boy of e…