I'm afraid to write about my personal life here.

My blog has explored a huge mess of subjects from the technologically related, to the automotive focused, to some obscure aspects of gaming and even a few laughs. However, one thing I always avoid was talking about my personal life, I’m too scared and here’s why.

At one point, I had an extremely long blog post about some misadventure in my life that was very personal and honestly revealed secrets about my past and my present condition. I decided to eventually remove it despite its popularity and relegated it to an unlinked part of my website only accessible by a certain URL. I only share it with those who are curious or in the appropriate communities.

For many, their blog is a journal of their life; what they’re struggling with. Like me, they’re brave enough to put their full name on it but there’s a really big caveat: Employers.

My entire perspective can be altered and skewed by those who creep up the most on me, those who are considering to hire me. I don’t hide my website on my resume, it’s right there on the corner. I can see in my analytics when a potential employer browses through my website and honestly they spend more time than the average reader.

My blog has an angry vibe to it, which is honestly my primary emotion before I fall into anxiety and depression. I consider myself a vocal and passionate person and whatever I’m going to write is going to be worded strongly and boldly.

I want to write about my life desperately yet I’m afraid that those who will guide my career will judge me for who I truly am: a broken and troubled person. I’ll be thrown out of the choice pool because I decided to express my freedom and complain about what ails me.

I didn’t realize how much employers search you from your LinkedIn profile to your Facebook account to anything else with your name. My name and username show my website as one of the first results in addition to other searches. If they could get a hold of your reddit account and dating profiles they would.

I don’t know anymore what criteria employers and clients use to judge their potentials. It’s been from experience to my volunteering and unfortunately a ‘background check’ of my online presence. Sometimes I wonder how an album of a trip to Cuba has anything to do with your performance and skill set, but let me tell you, every picture will be looked at.

Working my first customer service job - My experience with Uber part-time

I started working for Uber in January 2019 when I left a software company and was looking my next foray into my software development adventures. I usually take a month break between jobs or contracts but at the time I was facing some financial troubles making it difficult to pay for my living expenses. I searched for easy to get jobs but I knew I wouldn’t get something right away. Eventually, I settled for Uber, initially by necessity. Uber requires a lot of paperwork to start picking up riders including a safety inspection. You’re considered self-employed so you’re responsible for registering a business and handling taxes.

I was working long shifts. Starting from 5 AM in the morning until 10 PM. Then another 4PM-9PM shift. This was on the weekdays mostly to serve people going to and from work. On Saturdays, it was usually from 4PM to midnight to satisfy those enjoying outings on the weekends both sober and drunk. Sunday was my break day and work was slow anyways, few people seemed to go out on Sundays.

I gained quite a bit of respect for taxi drivers and bus drivers. Driving for 8-10 hours a day was really difficult with the constant concentration and physical activity. I came back home with cramps all over my body and pain medication was my best friend. I took weeks for my body to adjust and the after shift pain went away.

Navigating a city was much harder than I though even with Google Maps. I actually asked my friend who was a bus driver how I could know the city better. He suggested to purchase the large maps from the gas station and start plotting routes on it. Eventually, the road network in Ottawa became more and more lucid in my mind and I started to rely less on navigation.

The most difficult part for me was actually finding the rider after the request. Incorrect addresses, misplaced pins and imprecise GPS positioning made it really hard. Sometimes I got the name of a venue and in tight downtown Ottawa sometimes it might be hard to find that particular restaurant. Pickup and dropoffs required me to stop sometimes in the middle of the road and I started to realize how impatient Ottawa drivers could be with frequent honking and overtaking.

When commuting to work you see only common driving situations. However, when exploring the city you get to see how wild drivers can be. Sudden lane changes, people going against one way streets, accidents, etc. Safety becomes much more paramount and require diligent attention. It didn’t help that you had a stranger passenger on board, you feel more obligated to protect them.

The amount of multitasking was quite overwhelming. First, you had to find and drop off the passenger in a safe location. You were to drive the car more smoothly and carefully than usual. Navigation was difficult too as you had to pay attention to both your phone and the street looking carefully for street names and not getting distracting missing an intersection. You had to talk and entertain the rider while doing all of the above. It didn’t help that I was driving a manual transmission car and all my limbs were busy.

After a month, I was back into my field. My car took quite the beating running thousands of kilometers. Within a month I need an oil change and a thorough brake job. Most of the driving was in the city and the heavy stop and go pace meant heavy fuel consumption. I started to understand why many Uber drivers purchased hybrids.

However, I realized after starting my new contract that I actually missed working for Uber. I decided to become a part time driver working on Saturdays only from 4PM to 1AM.

Uber was my first customer service job and it was totally different from anything I’ve done sitting in an office. Honestly, it was quite the relief from the isolation in being in a cubicle. It wasn’t about making a big company bigger, but rather serving people. It felt way more fulfilling than anything I’ve ever done. I actually felt like I was making people happy and providing them a service they needed. Intoxicated people were no longer driving, instead I was sober able to them home safely.

It didn’t help that I’m extremely passionate about driving. The part I look the most forward to in the day is my commute to the office. Every Sunday, I take my car for a 100 km stroll. I find driving very satisfying and engaging. Although I’m not a car enthusiast in the sense that I want to collect them or know how they work very well, I’m a driving enthusiast.

The job became more of a hobby for me rather than work. I actually looked forward to every Saturday more even then the weekdays with my day job.

I don’t think Uber is a good full-time job as it seems to make little money. However, if you’re interested in the social aspect and driving, it’s a much more interesting proposition. For those who work in an office all the time, I highly recommend trying a customer service job just to see what it’s like.

Ottawa Computing Group

I’ve just founded a meetup group in Ottawa, ON for programmers and hackers to work together or alone on whatever projects they’re endavouring in.

From the meetup description:

“Writing the next hot Android App or making a mundane Web App? Bring your laptop and hack away at your next computing project. Everything is welcome whether is traditional software development or administrating your personal website server. If you can do it on a laptop, than you're welcome to join.

You can both hide in your corner quietly typing away or sit in a group with your portable rigs on table and discuss your next big computing adventure.

This group has no focus on the type of technology being worked on, whether it's a basic web project or artificial intelligence or machine learning. Bring your ideas with you and share them with the group.

Non-hackers are welcome to join if they want to be thought how to code, we're all open for learning opportunities. Just ask anyone if they're willing to teach you new skills. If you're stuck on some tricky part of your project, ask your peers for help.

We will be meeting weekly in various coffee shops in the downtown area. If we get big enough, we can have groups in the suburbias of Ottawa.

Feel free to be late to the party or come in a bit earlier. Leave whenever you're tired at staring at your screen or have a more important date coming up.”

Hoping to meet you exciting people and see projects beyond my comfort zone!

cdahmedeh - The History Behind my Username

My username dates far back, to approximately 2002, when I was still an early teenager. At the time, I spend most of my time playing on the Sega Genesis and the Sonic series were my favourite. One day, at Wal-Mart, I found a box for a PC Game called Sonic CD, I wanted it and made my father spent 30$ CAD on it.

Like everyone else, when I registered on forums, I wanted to have a pseudonym, though I preferred that my name would be in it somewhere.

At the time, Sonic CD was my favourite game of all time, as embarrassing as it was but don’t worry, it’s not the case anymore.

I was a bit inspired by my father’s pseudonym htarekh and I wanted my username to be cdahmedcd but I found it too repetitive, and substituted the second ‘cd’ to the prominent letters in my last name El-Hajjar, therefore ‘eh’. I ended up with cdahmedeh.

The username stuck with me for a long time and never really bothered to change it, even up to until today.

The proper pronunciation for the username is like this:

C D Ahmed E H

I don’t really make the effort in correcting people when trying to find the original meaning or pronouncing it, I think it’s interesting to see what people come up with.

What a boring reason!

Procedural Music in 256 bytes.

If there is one type of music that I have an incredibly strong taste for, it’s chiptune music, ones played by electronic circuits and chips rather than actual instruments. Classic games are a great source of these tracks and some of my most memorable melodies come from them.

During the Oldskool 4K Intro competition at Revision 2017, the Swedish hacker Linus Åkesson, manages destroy the 4K intro limit, with a tiny program in 256 bytes for the Commodore 64, a 1/128 factor reduction of the maximum. It is not a surprise that it won first place in the competition.

My day job involves me working with bloated runtimes and gigantic libraries that some span in the order of several gigabytes. Powerful machines with several cores and gigabytes of RAM are required to run these applications.

I am humbled by classic video game designers who had to work with tiny amounts of RAM and pathetic processors found in calculators like the Motorola 68000 and still manage to have colourful experiences with wonderful sound running at 60 frames per second.

The goal of these developers wasn’t some philosophy like maintainability or a certain idioms or design patterns, but rather extracting the most out of the hardware and provide the most impressive gaming experience.

When the Revision 2017 demo competition was over, I start looking at the winners, and nothing touched me more than the “A Mind is Born” demo. His technical description barely fits in my head and makes me feel like a novice programmer in my first programming course.

The actual executable is 256 bytes, and there was room to spare with the first instruction being a no-op (NOP). Ironically, the SID tune is larger at 325 bytes and encoding to MP3 would make a file larger than 2 MB. Encoding this blog post in UTF-8 is more than 256 bytes!

The music is generated by the program itself rather than having a score embedded in the program. The conductor isn’t the programmer, but the program. This is the procedural aspect of it. It sounds like a chaotic psytrance piece building up to a strong climax at 1:42 morphing into a real pseudo-orchestra.

This chilling piece of music shows what the mind of true geniuses can produce. If you don’t get goosebumps listening to this, you have no appreciation of true technical art. I recommend a listen with a good set of headphones to enjoy the incredibly deep bassline.