Series on Ahmed Alghali Blog

On Entering Machine Learning Competitions

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0300

Almost everyone can build a machine learning model now. you can prompt your way into a working pipeline in a matter of five minutes. building a model is not the problem, optimizing it is, understanding how and what it is doing are two completely different things, and that gap becomes very visible the moment you step into a competition.

I spent time participating in competitions on Kaggle and Zindi , joining teams, reading solutions, watching people work. and the pattern I kept seeing was the same: build a baseline, iterate, submit, repeat, and that’s fine, that’s how it works, but without ever asking why the iteration was moving in a particular direction. not having a compass. is what mostly happen. the leaderboard becomes the only signal, and you start optimizing for a number without understanding what the number means. that’s not learning. that’s just another form of guessing.

On Video Editing

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0300

My earliest memory of a real community is 249 Unit, a video editing group I joined in 2018, when I was around fifteen. I don’t remember how I found it. I only remember the texture of being inside it: the average age was seventeen, a few outliers in their early twenties, and the whole thing had the specific energy that comes when people are young and making things together before anyone is doing it for money.

Walking Contradictions: I Hate Managing. I Keep Leading.

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:00:00 +0300

People have a habit of reading me as someone who is chasing something I’m not. they see the startups I’ve been part of, the teams I’ve found myself inside, the communities I’ve helped shape, and they conclude: entrepreneur. business minded. someone with their eye on the market.

That reading has always been a little off. I was never the one who applied. I was nominated, referenced, recommended. I got pulled in. and the reason that distinction matters is because it points to the actual motive, which was never money, and never the feeling of being supreme over others. I don’t love controlling people. I genuinely don’t. not out of shyness, not out of some performed humility, but because responsibility is something I fear, and because I have always preferred being a contributor over being a manager. a contributor does the work. a manager mostly speaks about how the work is progressing. I despised that image of leadership since I was young.

Walking Contradictions - I Dont Love Leadership

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:34:31 +0300

There has been a contradiction in my life for years, and I have only recently started articulating it clearly. I have led communities before . I have been part of founding teams. I have worked inside startups. I repeatedly find myself in environments where leadership, impact are either finds me or is quietly handed to me. yet despite this pattern, I do not think of myself as someone who loves leadership. In fact, if I am honest, I have often avoided it.

Walking Contradictions - Good With People, Afraid of People

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:12:58 +0300

Recently, a friend (North) told me something that summarized almost every failed attempt I had at explaining myself in relationships. he said although I wonder around and communicate, I am not dependent on being loved, and I am not dependent on being liked by everyone. and indeed I do not move through life chasing validation or needing reassurance that I matter.

What Wren Carried — 06: Starting to Get Excited

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

It is a month later now. Wren has been going through something that feels painfully familiar to me, something close to the days I once lived without understanding . today he texted me, excited, talking about learning psychology and trying to understand the human mind and anxiety. I felt briefly happy for him. he sounded genuinely alive, like someone who had finally found a door he wanted to open.

Wren is not usually the type to dive into these themes. he is into anything but interoception, so when he spoke with that kind of curiosity, it caught my attention. then he said something that touched me. he said there were no days he hated himself more than those days. the moment I read that, I felt tightened inside.

Notes on Writing - Writing is Why I Understand Myself

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 05:53:05 +0300

I once emphasized how I see writing as a must , and how it helps me to understand myself . I did not say that lightly. At the time, I thought I was already being radical in my statement. I thought calling writing a “must” was extreme enough. But I have come to a stronger conclusion since then,

Notes on Writing - Connecting Notes

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:35:00 +0300

Some of the things that force clarity of mind in writing are not the words only and the choice of words, but the links between them. linking notes is not a decorative feature. it is structural. it allows thought to move from being scattered into being shaped. this is something that can hardly be utilized in regular note taking apps, but when you use a more sophisticated system or a personal blog, you allow this feature to exist naturally.

What Wren Carried — 05: From Confusion to Clarity

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

Following up with Wren, and after consulting doctors, it turned out that on the same day I shared with him what a doctor had told me about his medical numbers, he received his latest diagnosis results. thankfully, his blood pressure had returned to normal. there was no persistent hypertension. it was also very unlikely that he was diabetic, as the doctors initially suggested.

He felt relief. he was happy, and so was I. it had been a very long time since I followed up this closely with a friend. this one was special. as I helped someone passing through something I once been through, and I know for sure the complications it would lead to. Wren is now more aware. I saw him today posting a video in his personal space about how he has started to see things clearly. how doubt is slowly turning into clarity.

What Wren Carried — 04: Learning to Acknowledge

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

I discovered that wren was lost. he was living in his head. he carried fears and doubts that no one knew about. one of these fears was that he did not know how to look at god. not out of lack of faith, but because the way we learned religion did not include space for what a man can endure from the inside. the emphasis on this is either completely absent or very shallow. because of that, he struggled to understand what he was going through. is it good. is it punishment. the men of religion did not emphasize this enough.

What Wren Carried — 03: The Weight Is Now Visible

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

I followed up with him again after that. this time, he told me the latest diagnosis. high red blood cell count. elevated sugar levels, though not urgent, at least for now. he said he was not planning to tell his family. they worry too much.

He sounded exhausted. too tired to sleep. he kept repeating something that stayed with me. that what he was suffering from was not the illness itself, but what his head was telling him. the collapse was not only physical, but mental too.

What Wren Carried — 02: Who He Chose to Speak To

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

I told the story of things we never expect to happen to us to a friend today. while listening, he paused and made a simple remark. he asked me why, out of all the people around him, he chose to talk to me about this.

I had not thought about that before.

The question forced me to re examine that friendship, or me and Wren, and the role I played in his life. honestly, it was not much. we enjoyed each other’s company. we hung out only a few times. nothing that would normally qualify as closeness.

What Wren Carried — 01: Faith

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0300

Wren’s heart is deeply faithful. when we lived in the same building, I never once saw him miss a prayer at the mosque. not even Fajr. no matter the hour, he was always there.

I met him when I was around eighteen, and we remained friends from that point on. he has one of the most beautiful voices I have ever heard in Quran recitation. our conversations were light. he was gentle, considerate, quiet. a pure soul. he did not have many people around him, at least that is how it felt to me.

What Wren Carried

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0300

About This Series

This story is about the gentle collapse of Wren, and I’m watching it all from a distance.

Wren is someone I’ve known for a few years now. the kind of person who doesn’t take up much space in a room. he’s older than me, a little more worn, a little more faithful, not just to God, but to the version of himself he’s been holding onto since long before I met him.

Startup Culture and Motives

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0300

I’ve been part of multiple startups, almost always as a founding team member, rarely as a founder. I don’t think I’m proud of it, and I even if I’m slightly proud. the pride sits next to some hard lessons about startup culture: why those environments are genuinely useful when you’re early in figuring yourself out, and why at some point you have to stop defaulting to yes.

This note continues from Walking Contradictions: I Don’t Love Leadership , and from the weight of being trusted , where I got into why people kept pulling me into these things when I was never the one seeking them out. this piece is less about the leadership and more about what I saw once I was inside.

Walking Contradictions – I Could Read You But Not Feel You

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:20:00 +0300

No matter how open, peaceful or loving you are, others can only connect with you at the depth they have reached within themselves.

This realization came to me at twenty one, and it was not gentle. it hurt to admit. I come from a spectrum of people who were never fully able to see others clearly , but I was not one of them. I was always good at analyzing people. I understood patterns, motives, insecurities. I even played the therapist role many times in my life, something I wrote about briefly here . understanding people was not magic. it is a basic human feature if you pay enough attention. the contradiction that confused me for years was this: I could understand almost everyone, yet I struggled to truly connect with them.

Elaborate: Adding New Friends System

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:40:00 +0300

You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
Sean, Good Will Hunting (Park Bench Scene)

Why I'm Sharing Notes - Cognitive Overload

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:31:42 +0300

Learn to write, I’m dead serious about that, because… pick some hard problems and learn to write very, very carefully. when I say pay attention to the word, I mean that pick the right words, organize them into the right phrases and get your sentences straight. read and write everyday and see if you can discover what is true.

Jordan Peterson

Action Influences Thoughts

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Action Influences Thought and Not The Other Way Around.

Most self help books sell you the same idea in different packaging: fix your mind first, then your life will follow. cultivate the right thoughts. visualize the outcome. build the belief before you build anything else.

Indeed there is truth in that, thoughts do shape action, I agree. but there is a half of the equation that nobody talks about, the feedback running in the other direction. action shapes thought. and it does, faster, and more permanently, than thinking ever could.

Why Im Sharing Notes - Why Im Writing in English

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 20:33:40 +0300

Why I am writing in English and not Arabic.

There is a guilt that comes with it. shame on me for writing in English while being Arab by mother and father. I have never fled to a western or European country. I was not obsessed with western movies, in fact I barely watch movies at all. I accidentally watched two movies in the past two years and that was it. yet I am still influenced by the west. that is simply the reality of the world we live in today. influence no longer requires migration. it travels through knowledge, through the internet, through science, through code.

The Reproducibility Problem in Machine Learning

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Reproducibility is the corner stone of science

Somewhere between building a model and publishing the results, something gets lost. not the results themselves, those make it into the paper. what gets lost is everything that would allow someone else to arrive at the same place.

This is the reproducibility problem in machine learning, and it is more widespread than most people admit.

In 2016, the journal Nature reported that around 70% of researchers had failed to reproduce another researcher’s results , and 50% had failed to reproduce their own. machine learning is no exception. a study that analyzed 400 papers from top AI conferences found that only 6% shared code, roughly 33% shared test data, and 54% shared nothing more than a pseudocode summary of their algorithm. not the environment. not the hyperparameters. not the exact version of the library that made it work. just a rough sketch of the idea.

Walking Contradictions: Head in the Clouds. Hands in The Ground

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

The art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.

I’ve spent a lot of time confused about my own wiring. not in a debilitating way, more like an ongoing low grade puzzle that I kept returning to. the confusion had a specific shape: I knew I was deeply analytical, the kind of person who could sit with an idea for hours without needing it to go anywhere, who would trace a concept back to its roots just for the satisfaction of understanding it fully. but I also noticed I was restless whenever nothing was being made. not bored exactly. more like something in me would protest, ask what all this thinking was actually for.

Learning Faliure Modes - Branching

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 10:50:51 +0300

This is part of a series of notes I’m taking to understand the person I am when learning something. most of them are about understanding myself and applying useful techniques.

Reading about neuroscience can help me save time instead of experimenting blindly and trying to see what works. and I plan to study neuroscience some day, but as for now I want to share what I’ve learned by myself, as I spent the first 19 years of my life learning how to learn. I never even signed up for the famous Coursera course on this topic. the road of learnign was lonely, paved with faliure moods, it was an experimentation based road.

Learning Faliure Modes - Floating Information

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 10:50:51 +0400

I call this problem floating information. It is a literal translation of the Arabic word “طائفة”, which means floating in space without connection. I first noticed that there is information that is not linked to anything. it has no context, it solves no problem, and this kind of information is the hardest to keep in my mind. I forget it very easily.

Why I'm Sharing Notes - Regret

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 23:50:55 +0300

One of the main incentives behind sharing my notes in public is not the urge to talk. As social creatures, we naturally love sharing experiences, stories, and ideas. But I buried that essential human feature for a long time. I used to post on Facebook , not consistently, and then I went through what I called “ Manulasis ”(I heard of this back in high school in one of the articles but I forget the spelling/word but never the definition): the tendency to give up explaining things to people. I essentially gave up sharing altogether. I became detached from the external world without even noticing, day by day.

Why I'm Sharing Notes — Learned Too Late

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 11:48:47 +0300

There’s an anecdote about Richard Feynman when a historian walks up to his desk and sees all the sheets of paper lying around on Mr Feynman desk and makes a comment about these being a record of Feynman’s thinking and then Mr Feynman corrects the historian and says that: these are not a record of my thinking I think on paper and then the historian presses on and says that surely you’re thinking in your head and these are only records of the thoughts in your head and that’s when Mr Feynman says: no they aren’t a record of my thinking process they are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.