J. Zaki

• Engineered a full-stack cold email marketing automation agent in Python, integrating Brevo, ZeroBounce, and Hunter.io for lead validation and Claude API for personalised outreach copy — targeting 200+ B2B prospects per campaign cycle.
• Implemented professional email infrastructure with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, achieving inbox delivery rates above 90% across cold outreach campaigns.
• Instrumented product analytics via PostHog, enabling funnel visibility from storefront visit to eBay click-through across all traffic sources.

My family started a business selling refurbished marine and industrial parts, mostly through eBay. The digital side — website, email outreach, analytics — was an afterthought. I stepped in to build it properly, which meant treating a small family operation with the same engineering rigour I'd apply at work. The constraint of zero budget made it more interesting, not less.

• Developed the "Failure First" Humanisation Framework — a strict LLM governance system eliminating generic AI prose, processing 20,000+ lines of unstructured transcript text per execution run.
• Engineered a modular orchestration layer (pipeline.py) managing state tracking via JSON, heuristic validation, and automated GitHub synchronisation via GitPython.
• Built a cross-platform desktop GUI using Tauri (Rust bridge) and React 19, enabling local filesystem access and Python execution within a high-performance dashboard.
• Integrated Telegram Bot and CLI interfaces for remote/interactive generation, optimising workflows for specialised content verticals.

I was writing AWS certification articles for Medium and realised the research-to-draft process was almost entirely mechanical. I built a pipeline to handle the mechanical part — scraping transcripts, structuring content, enforcing quality rules — so the human part (judgment, voice, editing) could actually matter. The "Failure First" framework came from noticing that most AI-generated content fails the same way: it starts safe and stays safe. I built rules specifically to break that pattern.

• Built an offline-first Progressive Web App using Service Workers and lazy caching to deliver 80MB of multilingual Islamic content (Arabic, Urdu, English) with zero server overhead.
• Recruited 40+ beta testers via Reddit (r/shias), gathering structured feedback across iOS Safari, Android Chrome, and desktop environments to drive iterative improvements.
• Maintained a zero-cost infrastructure footprint using GitHub Pages for hosting, with no backend dependency.

The existing apps for Islamic supplications were clunky, ad-heavy, or required a constant internet connection. For something as personal as duas and ziyarat — prayers you turn to in quiet moments — that friction felt wrong. I wanted something that worked offline, in your language, on any device, with no ads and no backend. I also wanted to understand the data well enough to build proper search and filtering, which meant reverse-engineering the source database myself.

• Integrated Supabase and PostGIS for geospatial backend management, supporting sub-100ms proximity queries for nearby runner detection.
• Built SQLite offline fallback, ensuring full GPS tracking functionality with zero data loss during network interruptions.
• Validated core user flows with 10 internal test users across Android devices, confirming GPS accuracy within 5 metres across all tested routes.

I wanted to understand what it actually takes to build a consumer mobile product end to end — not a tutorial project, but something with real architecture decisions, a real backend, and real UX tradeoffs. Running was the use case because I run, and the features I wanted (ghost routes, nearby runners) didn't exist in a form I liked. Clean Architecture and Riverpod were deliberate choices to stress-test my ability to structure a non-trivial codebase.

• Engineered a Python EPUB-to-SQLite conversion pipeline, reducing per-book ingestion time to under 30 seconds for titles up to 500 pages.
• Planned advanced features including FreeType font rendering and deep-sleep power management targeting <10mA average draw.

Reading on a phone destroys your eyes and your battery life. E-readers exist but they're expensive, locked down, and designed around ecosystems I don't want to be in. I wanted a device that did exactly one thing — display text clearly — and cost almost nothing to run. Building the firmware myself meant I could understand every layer of the stack, from EPUB parsing down to the display driver.

• Maintained 99%+ uptime over 18+ months of continuous use, with automated session persistence eliminating context loss between work sessions.
• Reduced local machine dependency to zero for all personal project development, freeing primary workstation for enterprise tooling only.

My personal projects involve a lot of long-running processes — builds, pipelines, SSH tunnels — that don't play well with a laptop that goes to sleep. I also wanted to be able to develop from my phone when I'm away from a desk. Oracle Cloud's free tier is genuinely powerful if you configure it right, and Zellij with persistent sessions solves the context-loss problem that makes remote development frustrating. This setup has become the backbone of every personal project I've shipped.