About

I am Ammar Mahdi, a web developer in Calgary. I lead web development at GrowME Marketing, where I have spent the better part of a decade building and maintaining websites for clients across Canada.

Most of that work is WordPress: custom themes, custom functionality, and the unglamorous job of keeping dozens of sites fast, secure, and online. I care about the parts people only notice when they go wrong. A page that loads in under a second. A form that always sends. A site that does not fall over when traffic spikes.

How I got here

I studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Alberta. The math taught me to sit with a hard problem until it makes sense. The computer science taught me to build the thing once I understand it. I joined GrowME in 2018 and have been shipping ever since, first as a developer and now leading the web team.

How I work

I have a few rules I keep coming back to:

• Fast by default. Performance is a feature, not a phase at the end.
• Boring where it counts. Clever code is fun to write and miserable to maintain. I pick the boring, reliable option for anything a client depends on.
• Leave it better. Every site I touch should be easier to work on when I hand it back than when I picked it up.
• Measure, then talk. Real numbers beat opinions. I would rather show you a before and after than argue about it.

Outside the editor

I tinker with electronics. There is something satisfying about a project where the feedback loop is a multimeter and a puff of smoke instead of a stack trace. It keeps me honest about how things actually work underneath the abstractions.