Hanzalah Waheed


Trying to understand how things work

my story so far, tldr;

Hanzalah Waheed

I like building software that brings order to complicated data and unclear requirements. At StockInsights AI, I work on systems for AI-driven financial products.

my work

StockInsights AI - Software Development Engineer

Aug 2024 – Present

I build the AI layer of an equity research platform: a RAG pipeline that auto-summarizes 25,000+ SEC and earnings filings a month, a multi-session AI chat system, and the frontend on top of both. Along the way I've migrated our full-text search off MongoDB Atlas, cut our Vercel bill ~80% by tracking down scraper traffic, and shipped the company's first recurring API revenue with Stripe metered billing.

PythonTypeScriptNext.jsPostgreSQLpgvectorAWSDocker

open source

my github

 

my builds

  • An application that helps you club together multiple images and then generate an A/B image for you, that you can post anywhere to A/B test your ideas. Launched on Peerlist, where it reached the top 30 on the leaderboard, and fully open-sourced.

    Next.jsTailwind CSSTypeScript
  • A web app that tracks your favourite Amazon products and notifies you when they hit their lowest price, using scheduled web scraping.

    Next.jsTailwind CSSTypeScriptPostgreSQLWeb Scraping
Archive (2 earlier projects)
  • An image-to-text extractor built on Tesseract.js, running OCR client-side with Cloudinary handling uploads.

    Next.jsTailwind CSSTypeScriptTesseractJSCloudinary
  • A headlines aggregator for India's top current affairs stories, and one of the first things I ever built, back in 2020.

    HTMLCSSJavaScript

Tech Stack

Python
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
AWS
Docker
Git
Next.js
JavaScript
Python
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
AWS
Docker
Git
Next.js
JavaScript
TypeScript
Shadcn
Zustand
Tanstack
HTML
CSS
React
Node.js
Tailwind
Zod
Drizzle
tRPC
TypeScript
Shadcn
Zustand
Tanstack
HTML
CSS
React
Node.js
Tailwind
Zod
Drizzle
tRPC

Blogs

I mostly write about tech and some personal thoughts on stuff I read.

View all
Jun 01, 20265 min read

Doomscrolling Github, Contributing to OSS and GSoC

Hanzalah's views on Open Source Software and contributing to OSS in the age of AI and coding harnesses. And how to participate in Google Summer of Code.

Feb 02, 20264 min read

Dissecting Vercel’s React Best Practices (Part 2): Bundle Size Optimizations

I'm looking into another best practice considered **CRITICAL** to improve performance when building React apps: **Bundle Size Optimization**.

Jan 25, 20266 min read

Dissecting Vercel’s React Best Practices (Part 1): Eliminating Async Waterfalls

In this blog post, I’ve discussed the **first and most critical category** from the skill: **Eliminating Waterfalls**. It’s one of the highest-leverage optimizations because sequential async work can silently add hundreds of milliseconds to your page load and API response times.

Jan 18, 20266 min read

Why Updating Data in Postgres Is More Expensive Than You Think

A real-world case study on updating multi-million row Postgres tables. Covers MVCC, TOAST, GIN indexes, and why rebuilding tables can be cheaper than updating them in place.

Jan 16, 20267 min read

Bit Manipulation Explained: Notes on the Core Techniques

These are my notes of Neetcodes' awesome video on Bit Manipulation. I am going to try my best to express his ideas in my own words for the reader to understand and for me to practice expressing complex ideas in simpler terms using markdown.

Bookery

I love reading. Here are some of my favorite books.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Tech

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Martin Kleppmann

KEEP BUILDING