On November 4th, 2019 we created a digital assistant for Meddy to just send notifications when certain events triggered. We called him Bandar. One year later and Bandar is now doing all sorts of things. In this post we talk about Bandar and all the things he does around the company.
Bandar Ibn Abu Bandar
We call our admin portal Abu Bandar. This is a reference to an old cartoon called Masameer one of the founders, Abdullah Al-Khenji, watched as a kid. In one of the episodes someone calls Abu Bandar to get an impossible thing done. …
Meddy’s business grew massively over the last few years; our main metrics grew across the board. This meant that our engineering, operations, sales and marketing all had to grow to match the new demand.
To be able to build the engineering team, I read 1000s of resumes and conducted 100s of interviews over the last few years. Hiring a frontend engineer was especially excruciating. One of the interviews in specific was so bad that it was almost like satire. The pinnacle of absurdity from this interview was the following interaction:
“How do you feel about working on AngularJS?”
“I’ll be honest, if I was offered a job with a company that is working on VueJS, I’d go with their offer.”…
This article is written by Kareem Ayesh and Yasser El-Sayed.
Meddy was founded in 2016 and has since had a lot of success thanks to the scale it hit. In 2019 we celebrated our 100,000th bookings and 3 millionth user served, on top of a Series A funding ⚡🔌️.
Meddy has gone through a lot of technical changes in the past four years. This article serves as a technical proposal to an infrastructure for a growing tech startup. …
This article is written by Kareem Ayesh and Yasser El-Sayed.
Meddy was founded in 2016 and has since had a lot of success thanks to the scale it hit. In 2019 we celebrated our 100,000th bookings and 3 millionth user served, on top of a Series A funding ⚡🔌️.
Meddy has gone through a lot of technical changes in the past four years. This article serves as a technical proposal to an infrastructure for a growing tech startup. …
I got the chance to set up Meddy’s new blog Hakeem (🔌🔌) which is a multilingual blog that exists in Arabic as well as English. Though there have been multiple posts about setting up a multilingual Ghost blog, I wanted to share the specific lessons that I’ve learnt from this experience and what you need to do to achieve the same. This also uses a different method than the one described in the Ghost blog, so if you’re looking at different methods then this is worth a read.
At the end of this post I will also be sharing the themes we used to get Hakeem off the ground. If you’re interested in that you can just click here and you’ll find it. …
This is part 2 of 2 on setting up your own VPN Server. Part 1 is the why and part 2 is the how.
Earlier I wrote about why you should set up your own VPN server. It comes down to three reasons: speed, security and price.
Note: this tutorial is for Apple devices only (iOS and MacOS), if you’d like to know how to set it up on other devices do let me know in the comments I’ll make another tutorial.
If you’re convinced that you should set up your own VPN, here’s how. Follow this tutorial to the T and if you have any problems put them in the comments and I’ll try to help you out. This should take you 10 minutes tops. …
This is part 1 of 2 on setting up your own VPN Server. Part 1 is the why and part 2 is the how.
Hello there 👋! I usually write more technically detailed blog posts, but I wanted to write one that can be read by just about anyone. I decided to make my own VPN and I think you should too.
I’ve been seeing more and more ads for VPN’s on YouTube sponsored by YouTubers; it’s not just any YouTubers but even super popular YouTubers like PewDiePie, Phillip Defranco, Boogie, are pimping out services like NordVPN and Hotspot Shield.
For the most part, I’m really happy seeing VPN advertisements since it raises awareness towards online privacy. However, some of the VPN providers online recently have been shady and — given that they have more access to your data than Facebook and Google combined — it’s disconcerting. …
About this Post
Software Entomology is a series of posts dedicated to dissecting several nasty bugs encountered by yours truly. This is parallel to a real entomologist dissecting real life bugs with the exception of the “real life” part. I’m doing this because I think it’s fairly important to keep track of the big bugs that you were able to catch and solved.
In these posts I’ll usually have a TL;DR section at the top that briefly describes the issue, problem, and solution. Then further down the post I get more detailed about my own experience and how I came to the solution.
Briefly
I’ll leave a brief description of the problem and solution in case you’re not interested in knowing about my own experience. …
In case you’re wondering what technologies have been used to build Meddy then wonder no more! Here’s a list of technologies that we use. Feel free to email me at yasser@meddy.com if you have any questions.
Backend
- Python — For the Zen
- Django — Backend application framework
- Apache — HTTP Webserver
- PostgreSQL — Database
- Celery — Scheduling tasks and running asynchronous
- Redis — Managing cache and as a message broker for Celery
- ElasticSearch — For searching and indexing our database at high speed and accuracy
- Sentry — For error reporting and bug tracking
- Grafana — For logging and monitoring
Frontend
- Javascript
- AngularJS — Front end web application…
You cannot use CSS code you built for an English web page for an Arabic web page.
I wrote a post previously about using SCSS to help you manage code for Arabic web pages. I’ve ran into a couple problems that I was able to solve with absolute elegance. If anyone reading this post has a better solution to this problem please let me know.
Brief Description of the Problem
If you are tasked with creating a page that goes from English to Arabic with the click of a button (as seen here on Meddy… shameless 🔌), you might be tempted to create one CSS file for that page and simply reuse it across the two versions of the page. Which makes sense, one file means that you’ll keep your application DRY and you can just focus on developing the CSS. …
