Ahmed Hossam

Imprisoned In My Own Mind

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:42:00 +0300

For a long time I was always convinced that I need to be “somewhere” to start doing what I actually want. For example I always wanted to start my own business/startup, but I was always saying “I only can start a startup when I move to the US”. Not in Egypt, not even in Europe, not in Canada, just the US. But lately I started to realize that this mindset is just putting myself in a prison when I don’t have to. I mean, I live in Egypt, there is nothing that can prevent me of doing business here, why the hell I have to go the US to start one? What is the point? There is no point, it’s just putting myself in a prison. Another excuse that I tell myself is: “I have a military service that I need to go to, so until I finish it I won’t be doing anything”. All of these excuses seems to me as nonsense right now, because there is NOTHING actually prevents me of doing anything, I can do whatever I want. But I decided to be imprisoned in my own mind.

I Graduated, now what?

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 12:18:42 +0300

The Tiger Book: 2 Lexical Analysis

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 12:18:42 +0300

The lexical analyzer (lexer) takes a stream of characters and produces a stream of names, keywords, and punctuation marks; it discards white space and comments between the tokens.

Lexical tokens have types in any programming language, example:

ID foo, x, n14
NUM 73, 0, 082
REAL 3.14, 10., 1e9, 0.5
COMMA ,
NOTEQ !=
LPAREN (
RPAREN )

Punctuation tokens such as IF, VOID , RETURN constructed from alphabetic characters are called reserved words and, in most languages, cannot be used as identifiers.

The Tiger Book: 1 Introduction

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 06:26:55 +0300

A compiler is built from many modules (lexical analysis, parsing, semantic analysis, IR translation, optimization, code generation, etc). Each module does a specific job, but they must work together. The interfaces between them are just as critical as the algorithms inside the modules.

Any large software system is much easier to understand and implement if the designer takes care with the fundamental abstractions and interfaces.

For a compiler, it’s better to break it to many pieces (modules). This allows for reuse of the components. For example, to change the target-machine for which the compiler generates machine code, you just need to change Frame Layout and Instruction Selection modules.

How I Made ChatGPT Run on My Terminal without an API key?

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 21:42:42 +0300

I had a problem where I wanted to stop leaving the terminal and going to ChatGPT back and forth just for a quick question. For example: git commands, I always forget most of git commands and I want to ask ChatGPT how can I do something using git. Also to take a suggestion for how to do something using bash (write a bash script to replace every space with a ‘_’ for all the files in that directory). It would be a lot faster if I can do it from the terminal without going to the browser.

I'm Done Pretending, I'm Officially All In Agentic Coding

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:41:41 +0300

Why I Quit Competitive Programming

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:41:41 +0300

TL;DR #

I tried competitive programming for a whole year and it didn’t work out well for me, I didn’t enjoy it and didn’t achieve anything remarkable as well. So it’s better to take the L and move on and try other things I wanted to try, but I couldn’t because of competitive programming. For the rest of the article I’m going to talk about the sunk cost fallacy.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Ahmed Hossam, a programmer, computer science student, chess fan, and aspiring engineer.

Currently I’m a Software Engineer at TJM Labs. I build AI bots to automate data entry.

You can find me on: