Omar Hassan
author
Backend engineer and open source contributor passionate about API design and system reliability. Omar documents his learning journey to help other developers grow alongside him.
5 articles
Articles by Omar Hassan
The War Story Tangent That Lost Me a Staff Engineer Offer
I've watched senior engineers bomb system design interviews for 2 years. Your production experience might actually be the problem. Here's why.
I Kept Failing System Design Interviews After 8 Years of Experience. Here's Why.
8 years of building distributed systems didn't help me pass interviews. I was answering from habit, not strategy. Here's the RADAR method that fixed it.
I Built Production Systems for a Decade and Still Froze at the Whiteboard
After 10 years building production systems, I kept freezing in interviews. Here's the 7-phase framework that finally fixed my whiteboard panic.
I Tried 3 PKM Tools for 6 Months as a Developer. Here's What Actually Survived.
After 11 abandoned note apps, I tested Obsidian, Notion, and one other for 6 months of real dev work. Only one actually stuck.
I Watched a Teammate Ignore My Carefully Written Docs. It Changed How I Write.
I spent 20 minutes writing thorough API docs. A week later, my teammate asked the same question. Here's what I changed about how I write documentation.