About Me on Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Migrating to Hugo

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 14:56:29 -0700

I have been meaning to move away from Wordpress to a static site generator for a very long time, due to:

The slowness of WP, since every page request makes multiple database calls due to the spaghetti code nature of WP and its plugin architecture. Caching can help somewhat, but it has brittle edge cases.
Its record of security holes. I mitigated this somewhat by isolating PHP as much as possible.
It is almost impossible to follow front-end optimization best-practices like minimizing the number of CSS and JS files because each WP plugin has its own

My original plan was to go with Acrylamid, but about a year ago I started experimenting with Hugo. Hugo is blazing fast because it is implemented in Go rather than a slow language like Python or Ruby, and this is game-changing. Nonetheless, it took me over a year to migrate. This post is about the issues I encountered and the workflow I adopted to make it work.

Racking up the miles

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:04:40 +0000

In November, I have flown from San Francisco to London, back to San Francisco, on to Auckland, Queenstown, Wellington, Auckland, back to San Francisco, Houston, back to Oakland. When combined with my upcoming trip to Bombay, I will have traveled 70,000 kilometers, or nearly twice the circumference of the Earth…

Breakfast of Popes

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:42:28 +0000

When I was a kid living in the forsaken wasteland that is Saudi Arabia, my father’s company would pay for one trip back to France each year. One treat my parents would give us on those trips back home, my brother and I, would be to take us to a café and get us each one of those old-fashioned teardrop-shaped bottles of Orangina. To this day, I still associate it with the taste of home.

She said Yes

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 03:00:00 +0000

I flew into London today. I took the adorable Shaheen B. to dinner at The Ledbury.

Between courses, I asked her to marry me. She said Yes. The only plausible explanation for this lapse in judgement is temporary insanity. I couldn’t be happier.

P.S. the ring is guaranteed to be De Beers-free and not a blood diamond, courtesy of the nice folks at Brilliant Earth, who by the greatest of coincidences are just across the street from my office.

Acxiom acquires Kefta

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 18:00:29 +0000

I guess it’s official now. Acxiom acquired my company, Kefta, last week. Acxiom is very discreet, but influential company, with a strong technical focus — how many public company CEOs do you know who are listed as inventors on their company’s patents? The other founders and myself came to the conclusion a merger will allow us to serve our customers better, ramp up our sales to capitalize on an exploding market and enhance our infrastructure, something that would have beeen much harder if we stayed independent.

What’s in my gadget bag?

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 23:36:51 +0000

Since Gizmodo isn’t going to ask me that question anytime soon, and since I haven’t written a blog entry in all of September yet, I have decided to take matters in my own hands.

I carry the following in the pockets of my jacket:

PalmOne Zire 72: far better ergonomics in practice than my previous Sony Clié UX50
A pair of Maui Jim sunglasses (changed recently from a pair of Serengeti driver’s). The shades are polarized and mirrored to minimize glare, and have an incredibly flexible and lightweight “Flexon” nitinol memory-alloy frame. I got mine in bronze tinted glasses — they are also availabe in a darker neutral gray, but the warmer tint was more comfortable.
A Sony-Ericsson T68i cell phone, somewhat dated but perfectly functional (this means a synchronized phone book thanks to iSync). It alsod provides my Zire 72 with Internet access via Bluetooth and GPRS.
A PQI Intelligent Stick 256MB USB flash drive, small enough to fit in my wallet
Three fountain pens in a leather case, a Montblanc Meisterstück (Aurora black ink), a Waterman Edson (Herbin Vert Pré green) and a S.T. Dupont (Private Reserve Naples blue).

My gadget bag is a Tumi expandable messenger bag. It holds:

I’m back on the web

Fri, 15 Mar 2002 22:27:16 +0000

My original home page, started in 1994, stopped working sometime around 96 or so when the machine it ran on, an old NeXTstation at Yale named octopus, was taken out of commission. I procrastinated on rebuilding it since.

Using a weblog tool like Radio UserLand makes it possible to rebuild my web page on a limited time budget, plus the weblog format is actually more sensible for a personal home page.

Resume

Tue, 11 Aug 1970 01:30:30 +0000

Fazal MAJID

Profile

I am a successful entrepreneur and hands-on CTO with a proven track record in the competitive and time-driven Internet and Mobile industry. I also have international experience in the Telecommunications and Networking fields. This background gives me a unique perspective across the entire application stack.

Skills

Founding and growing startups
Building and managing engineering and ops teams
Project management
Cost-effective scaling (Mobile, Web, Big Data and Cloud)
Performance optimization and application tuning
Database and Big Data design and management
Network architecture, Telecommunications OSS and BSS architecture
Expert in Python, C and Go on UNIX platforms
I was granted two patents

Experience

June 2017–Present

San Francisco, CA, USA

Our mission is to deliver the best marketing analytics platform to ensure that our customers can not only do their job—but excel at it. Singular tracks $10B in spend and has over 2,000 integration partners.

Singular Labs

CTO, Americas

Apsalar merged with Singular in June 2017, combining best-in-class marketing analytics and attribution.