YOUSSEF JAD | THE DIGITAL PORTER

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Youssef Jad
Youssef Jad Senior Software Engineer · Tech Lead at Zid

About

I'm Youssef Jad, a Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead at Zid, based in Cairo, Egypt. I've spent 10+ years building and scaling backend systems, leading engineering teams, and shipping products from zero to production.

Currently leading a squad of 10 engineers as the Founding Tech Lead of ZidPos — a point-of-sale platform built inside a 201-500+ employee engineering organisation. My stack is PHP/Laravel, but my obsession is systems thinking: performance, architecture, and the human side of engineering.

Earlier in my career, I did white-hat security research and earned a spot in the Security Hall of Fame at Nokia, HubSpot, ESET, and Sky TV.

This blog is where I write about the things I wish I'd read when I was coming up — engineering leadership, backend performance, and the craft of building software at scale.

LinkedIn GitHub
10+ Years
Backend engineering experience
10 Engineers
Team I lead at Zid (201-500+ employee org)
40% Faster
API response time after refactoring core modules
390+ PRs
Created, and reviewed hundreds more
Hall of Fame
Nokia · HubSpot · ESET · Sky TV (White Hat)

Network Archives

2026.05.10

Fuzzy Arabic Search Without Elasticsearch: Solving التشكيل, الألف, and المد in PostgreSQL

You need fuzzy Arabic search but don’t want to introduce Elasticsearch. PostgreSQL can do it—but Arabic diacritics, character variants, and multi-schema operator issues will fight you every step of the way. Here’s how to win.

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 2026.05.02

I Lost My Mother. A Video Game Helped Me Carry the Weight.

I don’t think grief works that way — you don’t pass it, you carry it. Some days the weight is manageable. Most nights it isn’t.

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 2026.04.30

Just start. Then — 'Here we go.' 😄

Ah, the nightmare of selecting a blogging system — too many choices. Should I get a domain? Should I custom build it? Overthinking is killing me, and overengineering is right around the corner, turning my weekend into a nightmare.

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 2026.04.29

My AI coding agent is hallucinating. Here is the road to fix it.

As a Tech Lead, my day is a constant battle of context-switching. In this era, we have the Power of Thanos in our hands with LLMs and AI Agents. But that power is a double-edged sword. The main enemy? Hallucinations.

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 2026.04.08

Stop Killing Your Database Performance: The Magic of Functional Indexing in MySQL

In the intricate realm of backend architecture and database optimization, an index is your best weapon for accelerating data retrieval. Most developers know the basics of indexing, but what happens when your perfectly indexed query suddenly betrays you and executes a Full Table Scan?

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 2026.03.18

You're Paying a Huge Performance Tax on Your JSON Columns. Here's the One-Line Fix.

You stored it in JSON for flexibility. That flexibility is now costing you full table scans on every filter. Virtual columns are the escape hatch you didn’t know existed.

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 2025.12.10

Scope Creep: How Projects Die in Silence

The meeting started at 2 PM. By 2:15, your 8-week project became a 12-week project. Nobody called it out. Nobody documented it. It just… happened. This is scope creep. It doesn’t arrive with a bang. It arrives in whispers.

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