Hi, I'm Saad.
I'm a full-stack developer and research associate, and at the moment a hobbyist iOS developer. I'm also pretty handy at machine learning and data science, among other stuff—I mean, that's the least you can expect from someone who's spent six years formally studying Computer Science.
Outside of my regularly scheduled programming, I listen to a ton of podcasts. (Shout out to the Accidental Tech Podcast, The Unmade Podcast, and the sadly defunct and technically-on-a-hiatus-but-very-likely-actually-dead Hello Internet podcast.) I also read books but not nearly as much as I'd like to. I also spend too many of my brain cycles worrying about not breaking my 983-day Apple Watch Activity Rings streak.
And sticking to the programmer cliché, I appreciate good coffee, but unlike those snobs, I prefer my quick-and-dirty instant stuff. I also have an infinite tolerance for heat—tested thoroughly and unscientifically by reaching the point of zero marginal effect on my taste buds with the addition of more Scovilles.
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This Website.
I built this website in 2020 as a practice in web development. Initially, it was a static website hosted on GitHub Pages – simple, basic, and boring.
Fast forward to now, and it has evolved into an unnecesssarily complex beast. It now features a sophisticated backend, a remotely-hosted web server, an SQLite database, and a semi-complete content management system for the blog.
The backend is constructed using the Python framework Flask and deployed using NGINX and Gunicorn on a Linux server. The server is small, literally nano, equipped with a modest 1 GB RAM and 25 GB storage – ample for my needs.
It looks half decent thanks to Bootstrap and its extensive open-source icon library. Typeface choices vary based on the selected theme; the current selection is Heading for large headers, i.e., h1, and Primary for everything else.
The source code is currently private, so unless you're me, that hyperlink is pointless.