Hanzalah Waheed

Trying to understand how things work

my story so far

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

Aug 2024 – Present

Software Development Engineer — StockInsights AI

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.

Python · TypeScript · Next.js · PostgreSQL · pgvector · AWS · Docker

open source

the grind, mapped

my builds

A/B Image Generator
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.js · Tailwind CSS · TypeScript
Product Owl
A web app that tracks your favourite Amazon products and notifies you when they hit their lowest price, using scheduled web scraping.
Next.js · Tailwind CSS · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Web Scraping

Archive (2 earlier projects)

Imagine Text
An image-to-text extractor built on Tesseract.js, running OCR client-side with Cloudinary handling uploads.
Next.js · Tailwind CSS · TypeScript · TesseractJS · Cloudinary
News Nation
A headlines aggregator for India's top current affairs stories, and one of the first things I ever built, back in 2020.
HTML · CSS · JavaScript

tools of the trade

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

writing

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

View all

Jul 14, 20268 min read

Halfway through GSoC: Building DataLoom

This blog post is about the progress we've made at DataLoom over the past month and a half.

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.

Bookery

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

Tech

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Martin Kleppmann

4/ 5

Details