Khaled Abou Alfa

Sun, 17 May 2026 21:34:51 -0400

🍿 Finished watching: Remarkably Bright Creatures. Fantastic movie. I don’t think I’ve seen a Sally Field movie since Mrs.Doubtfire, but she really nailed her character and lifts the movie.

Sun, 17 May 2026 18:49:46 -0400

It is a rarity these days to get some mental calm and try and get into a good book. I’ve tried to read this book a few times in the last couple of years. The concept is great, just need to commit.

Sun, 17 May 2026 11:04:49 -0400

First time I have felt the warmth of the sun on my skin and head for 6 months. No idea if that is healthy or not - but it’s an incredibly welcome feeling at the moment.

Vibe Coding

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:38:28 -0400

It’s a term I’ve only recently heard and it’s something that I have spent the last month leaning into heavily. I’ve ‘created’ 12 apps to help me manage my life (both at work and outside work). I don’t know how I feel about that term however. Vibe sounds like I’m just jamming or it’s totally inconsequential.

These apps are in fact very important to me now as I am making decisions on how to spend money. I’m understanding my eating and drinking habits and making modifications. As a family there is no stress about what we’re eating on any given day.

Technology is intended to help you through things. Not hijack your attention or extract more money from you. How you choose to use the technology is of real consequence and for me, clarity has provided a certain amount of calmness to actions.

The only thing that I do lament is the fact that life is slower at unfolding than updates to the code.

Also, do I give 2 monkey’s about what the underlying codebase? I give as much of a monkey’s as I do in understanding the inner workings of my car engine or the electronics of my phone.

Software is going through a tremendous transformation. This is really early days of this technology, but it will transform the way we do things. There are no vibes attached.

Thu, 14 May 2026 22:21:53 -0400

Danish police disperse pro-Palestinian activists who attempted to blockade the headquarters of the giant shipping company Maersk based in Copenhagen Denmark. That is one brutal way to ‘disperse’ activists. I’m seriously proud of those that make a stand and put their bodies on the line for people far away. Genocide is not ok. You cannot support these racist and inhumane activities and expect people to remain silent.

Thu, 14 May 2026 22:21:48 -0400

Why birds don’t crash (and what humans can learn from them). Absolutely loved the insight in this video.

Thu, 14 May 2026 10:42:09 -0400

It’s been a really strange year so far. A lot of life happening. A lot of things that have disrupted my thoughts and energy. Which has reflected into a lack of engagement online.

Sat, 09 May 2026 18:49:05 -0400

World War 3 Is About To Begin. Diary of a CEO with Professor Jiang. It’s 2 hours long and one of the most engaging things you will listen to or watch all year.

Fri, 08 May 2026 20:15:26 -0400

Sun, 03 May 2026 16:53:01 -0400

Gary Neville & Jamie Carragher react to Man Utd’s win over Liverpool! Absolutely loving Jamie loosing his shit over the fact that his team were crap and got battered. Manchester United scored all 5 goals this game. It was glorious.

LifeOS

Fri, 01 May 2026 22:42:50 -0400

I have been building apps with Claude for several weeks now. In that time I have been able to ‘develop’ five super capable apps. All in HTML/Javascript (so open in any web browser). The first was my biggest pain point, a finance app. It took the longest but also taught me the most. I’ve since created a Markdown table generator, Meal Planner and Contacts app and another app that I’m not going to disclose but is for my mental sanity. All tailored for me, by me.

I honestly feel like a kid in a candy store just building utilities the way my brain is wired. The only reason for not building more is tokens and time. For the time being I have concentrated on ensuring that I take care of my private life first before I turn to enhancing and taking control of my professional life.

It’s been a fascinating experiment of making our life better by outsourcing some of the mundane and some of the obfuscated elements of our daily life and seeing things in a different manner than what some engineer (or group of engineers) pulled together at some point in time. I have at least 3 more app ideas ready to go (one is the first of the WorkOS suite of apps).

After really going through an existential crisis, I am finding real world utility and it has changed both my behaviour in the real world for the better.

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:45:54 -0400

whoami.wiki. This looks incredible.

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:59:48 -0400

Om’s article Software Eats Its Own looks at it from a software engineer’s perspective - and I can completely understand because what is happening in the software industry will ultimately impact every single knowledge worker out there (including engineering, architecture, consulting, legal, education and the list goes on).

It is not the industrialisation of software, rather of knowledge work in its entirety (to really varying levels).

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:48:52 -0400

It’s good to be able to enjoy some outside space again. Took me hours to clean the mess the kids had made over the winter.

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:32:42 -0400

I have a proper crush on Hannah Fry (math professor at Cambridge University). It’s the style of what she is saying, but also how she breaks things down that I love.

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:42:58 -0400

I was talking to a contractor in Ottawa and they mentioned that during a careers fair for a civil contractor, one of the largest number of applicants were senior software engineers that had been without a job for over a year in some cases.

I knew this was our new shared reality, but can also see the winds of change for many (most?) industries.

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:17:44 -0400

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 22:50:15 -0400

I have spent all day developing a finances app with Claude. It’s really been an incredible process but honestly speaks to the amount of wasted time in trying to either put something together or polish something. The results are staggering, only because I know the level of effort it traditionally takes to make software. This is 2026.

Remember that we over estimate the advances technology can make in a few years and under estimate what it can do in 10…

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:49:06 -0400

We had an amazing couple of evenings here in Toronto. A light jacket. The sun was shinning. A bit of park action. A bit of ice cream action. Hopefully we’ll be greeted with the first buds on trees.

Discovering AI

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:32:49 -0400

For a while now AI has been a curiosity for me.

This weekend it because something else. I think my conception of the ‘tool’ was that it was hype but no real substance yet. It had a while to go before it could do anything meaningful in my life - much less actually having an impact on my life.

Then I tried Claude.

Until this weekend I had essentially dabbled in Co-Pilot at work, ChatGPT on occasion and Gemini during google searches. I tried Deepseek when it first came out and it was, meh - nothing spectacular, similar structure to a ChatGPT (although I like the open source element to it all). I hesitate to add Siri into this, but Siri is a stupid, stupid AI assistant. Apple clearly have no idea what they’re doing in this space.

Back to Claude.

Claude was different. It doesn’t add superfluous word salad in the responses - trying to pad things out. I used it to help me sort out a complicated element of my taxes. I then asked it to help me with some bios for my CV at work. I then asked it for some coding help. And it not only delivered on all of these tasks, it legitimately did a good job. While other reached garbage-60% useful, the outputs where consistently hovering at the 90% useful.

I liken this moment to when I first discovered the internet. And to bring the analogy full circle, ChatGPT/Gemini/etc are to Claude, as Yahoo!/AskJeeves/Microsoft Search is to Google.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:01:40 -0400

The world is about to get seriously disrupted in ways I honestly didn’t think was possible, so quickly. I thought certain professions were likely immune, at least for a while. The reality is that this is not the case at all. Disruption is coming for us all.

I honestly don’t know what is scarier. What I will face or what my boys will face.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:07:16 -0400

Its taken a while, but new look index page is sorted.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:55:27 -0400

Talking with my mother about the US/Iran negotiations and she dropped a gem, ‘It takes Iranians 12 years to make a rug. You can’t expect them to negotiate peace in 1 day.’

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:10:17 -0400

You know that moment in time when you realise that you are using something special. I remember Richard telling me about Google in the first year of University. I remember using an iPhone for the first time. Getting into a Tesla for the first time.

I can now add Claude into that mix. If you’ve been using ChatGPT, Co-Pilot or anything else, I highly recommend using Claude instead. Same tasks, much better and mind boggling results.

For me it was a complicated tax related document, 54 pages deep. It would have taken me 3-6 hours to parse through it all, build a spreadsheet. Took Claude 2-3 minutes while I brushed my teeth - 🤯🤯🤯.

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:46:47 -0400

I mean, this is what Americans are paying for. Americans work hard. Have limited holidays. They suffer from a limited social net, but when they work and they buy things they are paying for the bombs and death and destruction in the name of Israel. Spend 30 seconds watching the destruction they sowed across Lebanon this afternoon.

These criminals have to be stopped and be held accountable.