An avatar image of Mohamed.

What Am I Doing Now?

Last updated on May 16, 2023

What is a "Now" page? This is an up-to-date page where I share anything going on right "now" in my life. I plan to try to keep it updated when the status of my work, interests, or hobbies change.

Learn more about the Now page here.

Work

I’m currently working at Aptiv as a Full Stack Software Engineer.

Projects

These days I’ve been enjoying building and tweaking this site. It gives me a chance to experience popular front-end technologies that I don’t typically use at work at the moment. The main tools I’m using are NextJS and TailwindCSS.

Since this is such a simple (and static) site right now, I’m also considering another popular web framework called Astro — which is known to be “BLAZINGLY” fast, since not as much JS gets sent to the users' browser. It should be fairly easy to make the switch (since Astro supports React), but I really like the versatility of NextJS right now. If I wanted to add more features that are more dynamic, NextJS already supports it out of the box.

Technical Writing

I’ve started a technical blog and have only written 2-3 blog posts. I’d like to get back to writing at some point; mainly to reinforce my knowledge about topics, but also as a bonus of maybe helping someone else in the future.

I’m in the process of moving the blog over to this site. Once I’m done with that, I’ll consider adding more content.

Passive Learning

I enjoy staying up-to-date with the tech industry and learning through other people’s experiences. Sometimes it’s nice to sit back and watch, read, or listen to someone talk about tech, business, or other self-improvement topics.

YouTube

I mostly watch web dev content on YouTube. Sometimes it’s tutorials when I’m curious about a piece of tech, other times it’s to learn tidbits of knowledge. It’s nice to see what people are doing and maybe pick up some tips/tricks along the way.

Podcasts

I started listening to podcasts early in my career while commuting 30 mins to and from work every day. I wasn’t a fan of just turning on a radio station and listening to music or some talk show. I heard some colleagues talking about podcasts and it piqued my curiosity. I really liked the idea of potentially learning something during long drives. I was hooked after trying it out for a few days. Now I always reach for podcasts when I’m driving anywhere, and even during monotonous activities throughout the day.

My current top 4:

  • Syntax
  • Startups For the Rest of Us
  • Indie Hackers
  • The Futur podcast

General

  • Hackernews
  • Twitter ("tech Twitter" community)
  • Blog posts

Hobbies

As much as I love the tech, not everything has to be about tech! I think it’s great having other hobbies to enjoy other aspects of life.

Sports

I like staying active by playing sports. It’s definitely my preferred way of getting some good cardio in. I mostly play basketball these days, but I also enjoy soccer and volleyball on occasion.

Video Games

These days I don’t play as many video games as I used to, but I do like to unwind and play occasionally. Especially ones that are engaging, challenging, and/ or have a great story. Couch multiplayer games with family or friends are fun sometimes too.

Board Games

Board games are almost always a good time with friends. I like ones that are easy to pick up and add fun/ chaos into the mix. I’m not really into the deeper ones that take a long time to set up or finish.

Recent ones that I’ve particularly enjoyed are “Incan Gold” and “Codenames”.