Profile Before You Optimise: A Five-Minute Habit
Most “slow” code is not slow where you think it is. Measure first, fix second — here is the five-minute loop, from flame graphs to the number you paste into a pull request.
khallaf
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Technology · Programming · AI
Daily tech tips for developers & AI enthusiasts
Short, practical articles that make a developer's day easier: programming techniques, AI workflows, web and mobile engineering, DevOps shortcuts and security habits that actually hold up in production.
16Articles published
7Focused topics
1Subject only: tech
// Latest articles
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Fresh from the workbench
Newest posts first — each one written to be read in a coffee break and used the same day.
Regex you will actually use
The small set of regex constructs that cover everyday work, the patterns worth keeping in a snippet file, and how to avoid catastrophic backtracking.
khallaf
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Flutter vs React Native in 2026
A concrete comparison of Flutter and React Native in 2026: rendering models, performance, ecosystem maturity, release process, and the questions that actually decide it.
khallaf
Core Web Vitals in practice
What LCP, INP and CLS actually measure, what breaks each score, and the highest-leverage fixes in the order that pays off fastest for real users.
khallaf
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Three Git Commands That Save an Hour Every Week
Bisect, autosquash and worktree: three built-in Git features that remove whole categories of tedious work, plus the reflog habits that get you out when one of them goes wrong.
khallaf
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Optimistic vs pessimistic locking: how to choose
Two requests touch the same row and one update silently disappears. How version checks, SELECT FOR UPDATE and retry loops behave in production, and how to pick between them.
khallaf
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// Categories
All categories →
One subject, seven directions
Programming
4 articles
Language features, algorithms, debugging techniques and everyday coding craft.
AI 2 articlesPractical artificial intelligence: prompt engineering, local models, automation and AI tooling.
Web Development 2 articlesFront-end and back-end web work: performance, accessibility, APIs and modern frameworks.
Mobile Development 2 articlesAndroid, iOS and cross-platform mobile engineering, from build tooling to store releases.
DevOps 2 articlesCI/CD, containers, servers, observability and everything that keeps a deployment alive.
Tools & Tricks 2 articlesShort, high-leverage tips: editors, command line shortcuts, scripts and small utilities.
Cybersecurity 2 articlesHardening, authentication, vulnerability classes and secure-by-default engineering.
// Featured tips
More tips →
Tips & tricks worth stealing
Short, high-leverage moves — the kind you apply in the next five minutes.
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Profile Before You Optimise: A Five-Minute Habit
Most “slow” code is not slow where you think it is. Measure first, fix second — here is the five-minute loop, from flame graphs to the number you paste into a pull request.
-
Core Web Vitals in practice
What LCP, INP and CLS actually measure, what breaks each score, and the highest-leverage fixes in the order that pays off fastest for real users.
-
Cutting a Docker image from 1 GB to 100 MB
A practical walkthrough of multi-stage builds, base image choices, layer order and cache hygiene that takes a typical Node image from roughly 1 GB down to about 100 MB.
// About
Why this site exists
Empowering developers, one tip at a time
Khallaf Tech is the writing arm of A1 Systems — a software studio that has been shipping products since 1993. Everything published here comes from real project work: the debugging session that took three hours, the deploy script that saved a night, the AI workflow that genuinely helped. No news filler, no hype, and no topic outside technology.
Apps we build and maintain
The same team publishes mobile and desktop applications through the A1 Systems catalog.