Hellloooo there!
I’m Hady and I live in (the most beautiful city in the world) Auckland, New Zealand.
I come from a strong software services background having worked at IBM and Datacom for around 9 years specialising as a full-stack, jack-of-all trades consultant. However, given my ambition to continue evolving the passionate developer in me, I joined Xero in 2014 to experience what it’s like to work for a product based company that cares about finesse, eye for detail and beautiful code that is a pleasure to work on everyday.
When I’m not coding after work on a side project (which rarely is the case), I will typically be either training-for or playing futsal - a game that I have been playing for over 15 years and made me travel around the world to places like Australia, Malaysia and even as far as Colombia!
Why do I blog?
My primary motivation behind this blog is for it to become a repository of all my thoughts and learnings that I have gathered over the years when jumping between tech-stacks, projects and companies. You will see me posting many code samples that either took me lots of time (and pulled hair) to work out, or little precious gems that I would like to have available for me at anytime.
Now I’m not the only primary audience that I target! The other target segment for this blog is you. I feel a lot of self fulfilment when I see that knowledge that I share with others has helped fix problems they’ve run into, or at least inspired them down the right track that they have been looking for. Now I am unsure if my blog would actually achieve that, but I do really hope that readers will find some value here.
About this blog
This blog is probably around my 5th attempt of creating an online presence for myself in many, many years. I started off with a blog running on Wordpress, moved to Tumblr, and not long after it had moved again on to Drupal. The reason I was not able to stay in one place is because each platform did not quite do what I wanted. Being the perfectionist that I sometimes can be, I kept getting distracted by tinkering with platform configuration and plugins, instead of actually writing.
Getting sick of making excuses for myself, I finally decided to absolutely commit to getting a blog up and running, and the solution came in the form of using Jekyll, a static website generator, and host it on GitHub Pages. Why was this platform any different? Well writing posts in Markdown and having complete control over my site templates almost felt like coding (fun!) and not tedious content authoring. GitHub pages also provided me with the ability of allowing readers to contribute to anything I write - an idea inspired by Phil Haack’s blog which excited me to try out as well.
I code, write and publish my blog posts using my favourite and trusty WebStorm IDE.
I also need to extend my gratitude to @SylvainLafitte for helping me with the site’s typography, and my dearest wife @DandoonG for her constant feedback during the blog’s development.
My Passion
Passion and past experiences are what forms many of our personalities and way of life. So to better introduce myself I have collated the following photosets of some of the things that inspire me everyday.
Futsal
I have played soccer for almost as long as I can remember, and been playing futsal since high school. Its a game of speed and agility. It’s also a game that I met many of my current network of contacts and besties.
In the name of transparency, as impressive as this shot might look like, the ball ended up going no where near the goal.
The final game score shall remain unmentioned.
Hackathons & Competitions
Throughout the years I have found that nothing grows me faster like putting myself outside my comfort zone and working under dire pressure with strangers in a short and fixed amount of time. I have discovered excitement of tech hackathons over the last couple of years and have learnt a lot from some great people along the way.
Awesome fun event for learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures.
The solution was praised for being commercially sound. The end to end experience was also thought through with realtime integration with Microsoft CRM and social media.
MetroFlight was a fully functioning Windows 8 app that allowed users to search and track flights anywhere in the world.
The New Zealand outdoors
Ever since I attended adult swimming classes almost 5 years ago and learnt how to tread (and kinda swim), I have discovered the New Zealand outdoors in a completely new and different light.
Serving the community
I am a strong believer that everything I am today has been a gift for me that I need to utilise in helping and teaching others.
