Anees Ahammed

Why I Built Sentinel

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:52:00 +0000

I Got Tired of Losing Errors Across My Services, So I Built a Zero-Setup Error Tracker in Go

I built Sentinel for a very simple reason: I was tired of losing errors in my own development setup.

I was working across a FastAPI backend, Celery workers, Celery Beat, frontend, Docker, Redis, Postgres, and Qdrant. Every part of the system had its own logs. Every service had something to say. When things broke, the error was usually there somewhere, but finding it was often more painful than it should have been.

DIY home Security System with an Old iPhone

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 11:36:55 +0100

Building a DIY Home Security System with an Old iPhone and Some Determination

Look, I’ll be honest with you - I was genuinely worried. Our new neighborhood has been seeing break-in attempts every other day. Car break-ins, people trying doorknobs at 2 AM… the whole deal. I needed something to monitor my driveway at night, and I needed it fast.

Commercial security cameras? They wanted €200+ per camera, plus subscription fees. Ring doorbell? Another subscription. I’m a developer - I build complex systems for a living. Surely I could figure this out myself, right?

📸 ShotBar: Because ⌃⇧⌘4 is ridiculous

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 13:52:00 +0000

📸 ShotBar: Because ⌃⇧⌘4 is ridiculous

I got tired of doing finger gymnastics every time I wanted to take a screenshot.

You know the drill: ⌃⇧⌘4, wait for the cursor to change, drag to select, hope you got the right area, repeat. It’s 2025 and we’re still doing this dance.

So I vibe-coded ShotBar in a weekend.

What it does

ShotBar sits in your menu bar and gives you three capture modes:

📦 grud: GitHub as database

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 23:00:00 +0000

Ever tried building an internal tool at a big enterprise and hit the wall when you need a simple database? That’s exactly why I built grud – a tiny JavaScript package that turns GitHub into your JSON database.

The Problem: Enterprise Tool Purgatory

Working as a consultant in big enterprises, I constantly run into this frustrating cycle. I want to build a quick internal tool – maybe a React app hosted on GitHub Pages. It’s perfect: easy to scaffold, deploy to a public URL, and I don’t need to raise tickets or wait for approvals.

🚀Hugo: Deploy with GitHub Actions

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 23:00:00 +0000

Setting up automated deployment for my Hugo blog was one of those tasks I kept putting off. You know how it is – the manual process works, so why change it? But once I finally took the plunge with GitHub Actions, I wondered why I waited so long.

This blog you’re reading right now is built with Hugo (a blazingly fast static site generator written in Go) and automatically deploys to GitHub Pages every time I commit a new post. Let me walk you through how I set it up.

DevOps at scale: GitHub

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m documenting some DevOps practices and personal recommendations we follow, especially around source control with Git and GitHub.

Working as a Lead DevOps Engineer at one of the biggest financial enterprises, SOC compliance is absolutely critical. Staying SOC compliant while scaling hundreds of projects and engineers? That’s nearly impossible without consistent team-wide practices and policies.

TL;DR

Have standard naming convention.
Follow trunk-based development.
Always protect the master & develop branch.
Set up PR pipelines that trigger on each Pull Request
Ensure each commit message links to Rally/Jira
Have a .gitignore file & never commit dependencies into source control
Avoid committing secrets into source control

Standard Naming Convention

The most important thing? Adopting consistent naming conventions across your entire organization. The first thing I did after joining this team was developing a web form where you enter your project details, and it spits out the exact naming convention to follow for repository names, pipeline jobs, SonarQube dashboards, Artifactory, and cloud-foundry component names & routes.

snapcircle🎯

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Moving to Ireland at 35 changed my relationship with coffee completely. Back in Dubai, I barely touched the stuff – maybe it was the heat, or just different habits. But Ireland’s coffee culture? It pulled me in fast.

Soon I had a routine: morning coffee from the local shop, another at the office before our daily sprint (essential for staying awake during those early meetings), and one more from “Seven Wonders” on my walk home. Three different shops, three different loyalty cards stuffed into my wallet.

glimpses Insights

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 23:00:00 +0000

This post is about a simple interactive visualization I made of glimpses analytics data, which reflects the global distribution of glimpses users with maximum sessions.

Thanks to Tableau Public and github-pages, I found these two solutions immensely helpful in creating, embedding and publishing viz.
Tableau Public is a free software that can connect to a file (Excel, CSV, JSON..) or to a server and create stunning interactive data visualizations for the web.

3 simple steps to keep your daily log 📝

Fri, 03 May 2019 23:00:00 +0000

I’ve always needed to track what I do at work each day. There are tons of fancy productivity apps out there, but here’s the problem: most office computers won’t let you install whatever you want.

So I’m sharing a simple trick I’ve used for over a decade. It works on any Windows machine because it uses the basic Notepad app that’s already installed.

The 3-Step Setup

Create a new text file (call it something like dailyLog.txt)
Type .LOG (all caps) on the first line, then press Enter
Save and close the file

That’s it.

GitHub Auto Tagger

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 23:00:00 +0000

I keep track of all my development work using GitHub project boards.

It not only helps me to see where work is flowing, queued or stalled but also to make our work as visible and transparent as possible.

To simplify, automate & improve GitHub issue management workflow therefore to scratch my own itch, I made a simple GitHub Probot app autotagger. It automatically tags the GitHub Issues based on the matched pattern.

RabbitMQ 🐰

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 11:36:55 +0100

 _______________
< Im not rabbit!! >
 ---------------
 \  ^__^
 \  (oo)\_______
 (__)\  )\/\
 ||----w |
 || ||

Today at work, had to demonstrate a proof of concept (POC) related to message queues, so need to spin-up a rabbitmq server. “Play with Docker” come to the rescue. In couple of minutes environment is up and ready.

docker run -d \
--hostname rabbit-host \
--name rabbit-container \
-p 80:15672 \
-p 5672:5672 \
-e RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER="rabbit" \
-e RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS="carrot" \
rabbitmq:3-management

PORT	Description
15672	RabbitMQ Management console uses PORT 15672 for RabbitMQ version 3.x .
55672	RabbitMQ Management console pre 3.x
5672	Main RabbitMQ PORT and is defined in RABBITMQ_NODE_PORT environment variable

You can find more about environment RabbitMQ env variables here https://www.rabbitmq.com/configure.html#define-environment-variables

Play with docker 🐳

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:36:55 +0000

🐳 Prerequisite

Make sure you have already created a Docker Hub account.

PWD

This post is about “Play with Docker” chrome-extension. Play with Docker(PWD) by itself is a simple, interactive and fun playground to learn Docker. This will give you a throwaway *nix shell, in which you can safely play with docker.

The extension adds a “Try in PWD” button on any Docker Hub image page. Here is a short demo of the same.

ഐറിഷ് ബ്രേക്‌ഫാസ്റ്

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 11:36:55 +0100

ഐറിഷ് ബ്രേക്‌ഫാസ്റ്

സൂര്യൻ ഉദിച്ചെന്നു ഉറപ്പു വരുത്തി, ഇന്നലെ രാത്രി ഗൂഗിൾ തിരച്ചിലിൽ നിന്നും കണ്ടു വച്ച ‘മസാല’ എന്ന ഇന്ത്യൻ ഹോട്ടലും തേടി ഇറങ്ങി. ചെറിയ മഴ ചാറലും കാറ്റും ഉണ്ട് .

കാലാവസ്ഥ മാറാൻ തുടങ്ങി ഇരിക്കുന്നു. അതൊന്നും വക വെക്കാതെ, നല്ല മസാല ദോശയും ഫിൽറ്റർ കോഫിയും സ്വപ്നം കണ്ടു വായിൽ കപ്പൽ ഓടിക്കാനുള്ള വെള്ളവും, വയറ്റിലെ ഗുളു ഗുളു ശബ്ദവും ഒക്കെ ആയി, ഹോട്ടലിനടുത്തെത്തിയപ്പോഴാണ് മനസ്സിലായത്, ഇവിടെ മിക്ക ഹോട്ടലുകളും വൈകീട്ടു 5 നു മാത്രമേ തുറക്കൂ എന്ന് .

വിശന്നു വിഷണ്ണനായി റൂമിൽ തിരികെ വന്നു. എന്തായാലും ഇന്ന് വല്ലതും കഴിച്ചിട്ട് തന്നെ എന്നുറപ്പിച്ചു ഹോട്ടൽ റെസ്റ്റാറ്റാന്റിലേക്ക്‌ വിളിച്ചു, രണ്ടു തരം ഭക്ഷണമാണുള്ളത് കോണ്ടിനെന്റൽ & ഫുൾ ഐറിഷ് ബ്രേക്‌ഫാസ്റ്. കോണ്ടിനെന്റൽ വില കുറവുണ്ട് 7 Euro , മറ്റേതു 10 Euro.

Rapid Prototyping

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 10:36:55 +0000

I want to share a recent remote consulting experience that reminded me why rapid prototyping is such a game-changer.

When you’re working with clients on mobile apps, getting clarity on design early is crucial. The prototype phase isn’t just important – it’s where you either nail the user experience or spend months fixing it later.

The Tool Doesn’t Make the Prototype

Sure, there are tons of dedicated prototyping tools out there. But I’ve seen brilliant prototypes built with PowerPoint, Keynote, even Word documents. If you’re a designer with Sketch skills or know HTML and CSS, you’re definitely ahead of the game.

XAML Styler for Visual Studio Mac

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 11:36:55 +0100

If you have already worked on WPF or any Windows Phone projects, you might have used the XAML Styler. Which is a visual studio extension for formatting XAML source code, which helps in maintaining better XAML coding style and better XAML readability.

Even though “Visual Studio for Mac” was available, I kept using Xamarin Studio because XAML Styler extension was not supported in VS for MAC.

Finally, Ben Lacey got a version compatible with VS for Mac. You can download it from the XamlStyler GitHub repository. I have tested it on the latest version of VS and is working fine.

Working with Microsoft

Thu, 10 Aug 2017 11:36:55 +0100

A couple of months back I got a chance to work with **Microsoft Middle East, Dubai ** to port the glimpses win32 app into Microsoft Store.

It was really important for us to be able to take advantage of the best that windows 10 has to offer without rebuilding the glimpses app.

Desktop Bridge provided the perfect solution for us to be able to keep all the work we’ve done before and embrace future, it is an obvious choice for us to give a more trustworthy source to users.

⏺Record your screen on Android!!

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 10:36:55 +0000

Ever wanted to record a tutorial or wanted to create a demo of your app you’d need to capture the screen in real time. Without installing any of third-party software this is daunting. So below is one of the easy steps to follow for geeks in you.

Download the platform-tools from below URL if you don’t have Android Studio installed.

developer.android.com

Hello World 👋

Sun, 14 May 2017 10:36:55 +0000

_____________
< Hello World >
 -------------
 \  ^__^
 \  (oo)\_______
 (__)\  )\/\
 ||----w |
 || ||

Hello, World!! I have wanted to start my own blog hosted on github.io for a while now.