Orange County, California — available for work
Incidents Systems Stack Contact

Full-stack developer · Support engineer

SAMMY B

I find out why it broke.

Ten years building and running production systems — Linux servers, mail delivery, WordPress at volume, Node.js applications, published Android software. Most of that work has been diagnosis: taking a symptom nobody can explain and returning a root cause.

Read the diagnoses
Scroll
0Years in
production
0WordPress sites
delivered
0Live properties
maintained
0Products shipped
and published
01 — Incidents

Four things that broke, and what was actually wrong.

Anyone can list technologies. These are real failures from real systems, written the way I worked them: symptom first, root cause last.

Symptom
Password resets, welcome mail and notifications stopped arriving. No errors surfaced to users, no exceptions in the application. Mail simply never landed.
Investigation
Traced the path outward rather than inward. Application logs showed messages accepted and handed off cleanly, which ruled out the code. The local mail queue confirmed messages were building up and never leaving the host — so the failure was below the application entirely.
Root cause
The hosting provider was blocking outbound SMTP at the network level. Nothing on the server was misconfigured; the port was simply closed upstream, and no layer of the stack was in a position to report that.
Resolution
Re-architected delivery to route through an external authenticated relay instead of sending direct. Password reset, welcome and notification flows all restored, and the delivery path no longer depends on the host's outbound policy.
Symptom
The application rendered correctly in Chrome and Firefox on every platform, and rendered nothing at all in Safari and on iOS. No console error that pointed anywhere useful.
Investigation
With no error to follow, I bisected instead of guessing — isolating the component tree piece by piece and reintroducing sections until the failure reappeared, narrowing from the whole application down to a single component.
Root cause
One component had grown large enough to hit a WebKit limit that other engines tolerate. The engine failed the render rather than reporting a fault, which is why nothing appeared in the logs.
Resolution
Split the component and restored rendering across Safari and iOS. Roughly half the mobile audience for a consumer product uses those browsers, so the failure was total for them and invisible from my own machine.
Symptom
Directional bearing was close to correct near home and increasingly wrong at distance — the kind of error that looks like a bug in the sensor code but isn't.
Investigation
Separated the two independent sources of error: the geometry producing the target bearing, and the hardware reporting the device's own heading. Testing each against known coordinates showed both were contributing.
Root cause
The bearing was being computed as if the earth were flat, which holds only over short distances. Separately, the magnetometer reports magnetic north while the calculation assumed true north — an offset that varies by geographic location.
Resolution
Replaced the flat approximation with great-circle bearing calculated from spherical geometry, and corrected device heading for magnetic declination at the user's coordinates. Accuracy now holds anywhere on earth.
Symptom
Three live properties, including a medical practice, were running on purchased certificates that had to be renewed and reinstalled by hand every year. One was 26 days from expiry, and the vendor's renewal was priced at several times the cost of a new certificate.
Investigation
Confirmed the platform had no automatic issuance available, and that the paid certificates were themselves blocking any managed alternative from taking over. Established that the account supported shell access, which made a self-managed ACME client viable.
Root cause
The real problem wasn't the expiry date — it was that renewal depended on a human remembering. Any process that fails silently once a year will eventually fail.
Resolution
Installed an ACME client at shell level with a scheduled renewal job, issued and deployed certificates for all three domains, and verified the full chain in the browser. Recurring cost eliminated, and renewal no longer depends on anyone noticing.
02 — Systems

Things I built.

Designed, deployed, and operated end to end — including the parts nobody enjoys.

MyArabDate

Architecture · Development · Operations

A consumer matchmaking platform built from nothing and deployed to production. Node.js and TypeScript behind Nginx on a Linux server, PostgreSQL through Prisma, real-time messaging over Socket.io, PayPal subscription billing, automated photo moderation, and push notifications. Releases ship through a GitHub Actions pipeline; I handle the certificates, migrations, and recovery myself.

Node.jsTypeScriptReactPostgreSQLNginxSocket.ioRedisCI/CD
Visit

Simply Athan

Native Android · Published

A Kotlin application on the Google Play Store that calculates location-based prayer times from device GPS using solar position algorithms, and renders a live directional compass corrected for magnetic declination. Supports multiple regional calculation conventions, schedules background notifications, and shipped through full Play review.

KotlinAndroid SDKSensorsGeolocationPlay Console
Play Store

CL AutoPost

Commercial desktop software

A Windows automation product sold under licence at $249 a seat. Python with a Tkinter interface and Selenium-driven browser automation, packaged as a standalone executable. Includes a full licensing system — machine fingerprinting, time-limited trials, and key validation against a remote backend with automatic token rotation.

PythonSeleniumTkinterPyInstallerOAuth
03 — Stack

What I work with.

Weighted toward the things I've actually run in production rather than everything I've touched.

Servers & Infrastructure

  • Linux (Ubuntu)
  • Nginx, reverse proxy config
  • DNS, SSL/TLS, ACME automation
  • SMTP configuration and delivery
  • cPanel / WHM administration
  • Shared, reseller, and VPS hosting

Application Development

  • TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js
  • React
  • Python
  • Kotlin, Android SDK
  • PHP
  • PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis

Web & Delivery

  • WordPress themes and plugins
  • WooCommerce
  • Cross-provider site migrations
  • Git, GitHub Actions
  • Google Play Console
  • Cross-browser debugging

Security

  • Authorized penetration testing
  • Vulnerability assessment
  • Passive reconnaissance
  • Session logging, IP blocklisting
  • Content moderation pipelines
04 — Contact

Send me something broken.

Open to technical support engineering, application support, systems and hosting operations, and internal IT. Based in Orange County and available remotely.