Articles on full-stack development, system design, automation, and shipping side projects — practical guides from real builds.
How I built Push Relay — a self-hosted browser-notification service on the open Web Push standard — then made it reusable infra with per-app keys and client SDKs.
Bilal Hasson
drf-spectacular gave me Swagger UI for free, but I built my own interactive API reference instead. How the custom docs page works — and why it was worth it.
Bilal Hasson
Why I built squish, a client-side image compressor with no server — the browser APIs behind it (File, Canvas, Web Workers, WASM) and the gotchas that taught me the most.
Bilal Hasson
How I built a Spotify stats app themed as a printable receipt — a proper server-side PKCE OAuth flow, and adapting honestly when the API kept saying no.
Bilal Hasson
How I built an embeddable live-chat widget: real-time messaging over WebSockets with Django Channels, a Shadow-DOM widget, and AI-assisted replies.
Bilal Hasson
An always-on gateway that boots a Railway project's whole stack on the first visit and stops it once idle — so demos only run when someone's using them.
Bilal Hasson
How I broke my ‘never shipped solo’ streak by building Tip Jar — an embeddable, Stripe-powered ‘buy me a coffee’ widget — and what actually finishing a side project taught me.
Bilal Hasson
How I built Uptime Monitor — a website and API monitoring service with scheduled checks, multi-channel alerts, team status pages, and uptime history, in Django.
Bilal Hasson
A full-stack guide to scaling from one server to millions of users: load balancing, caching, CDNs, database sharding and more — explained with wit.
Bilal Hasson
Part 1 of my system-design series: how a single-server setup works, where it breaks, and why scaling starts here — a clear primer for developers.
Bilal Hasson
Part 2 of my scaling series: microservices, distributed caching, event-driven architecture, autoscaling, and database strategies for resilient apps.
Bilal Hasson
A practical guide to the 12-Factor App methodology: the twelve principles for building scalable, portable, maintainable software — with examples.
Bilal Hasson
A playful intro to Ansible: automate repetitive ops with Python-powered playbooks — what it is, why it helps, and how I put it to work.
Bilal Hasson
Turbo managed monorepo to host your online portfolio. Host your blog, create pages, manage different content blocks and extend to create your own
Bilal Hasson
My previous employers spent £55,000+ doing what I automated in days and now runs for free, how's that for return on investment. I love automating a manual task.
Bilal Hasson
How I unified user management across platforms — from an app-support role juggling manual account tasks to one streamlined, automated process.
Bilal Hasson
Boost manual testing with Postman automation: one POST request with a post-response script that chains calls to all your APIs. A simple walkthrough.
Bilal Hasson