# Mehboob Ali

> Principal Software Engineer in Lahore, Pakistan. Backend systems, technical
> leadership, and developer tooling. Currently leads the CMDB and Workflow
> Automation programs at 7Vals, and builds tooling that both engineers and coding
> agents use.

Open to remote or relocation. Contact: mehboob@mehboob.dev

## Selected work

- Device synchronization: rebuilt a Rails sync pipeline running 12-15 hours down to
  under an hour, using batching and eager loading. The pattern was reused across
  later device integrations.
- CMDB / IT Graph: led a 5-engineer team for roughly seven months, architecture to
  production, covering configuration-item modeling and n-level relationship traversal.
- Workflow Automation: technical lead for an approximately 8-engineer team.

## Open source

- [rmine](https://github.com/mehboobali98/rmine): a Go CLI for Redmine covering
  issues, projects and time tracking, designed for developers, scripts and coding
  agents. Ships an embedded Claude Code skill installed via `rmine skill install`.
- [rmine-skills](https://github.com/mehboobali98/rmine-skills): Claude Code workflow
  skills built on rmine, including a spec-gated effort estimator that runs three
  subagents and a calibration skill that checks estimates against logged time.
- [bitwise_attributes](https://github.com/mehboobali98/bitwise_attributes): a Ruby gem
  packing boolean flags into a single ActiveRecord integer column.

## Writing

- [Every fixture was one line long](https://mehboob.dev/blog/every-fixture-was-one-line-long/) (2026-08-25): A review found that the one feature my job-search tool exists for was destroying its own output. The test suite stayed green through all of it, because every fixture in it shared the assumption the bug was made of.
- [The edge said HIT. The browser asked anyway.](https://mehboob.dev/blog/the-edge-said-hit/) (2026-08-24): Cloudflare was caching this site's assets and reporting it on every response. The browser was still revalidating all six of them on every visit, because of a default header I had never read.
- [What changed when an agent started using my CLI](https://mehboob.dev/blog/designing-a-cli-for-agents/) (2026-08-20): rmine was built for two callers from the start: me at a terminal, and a coding agent. The design decisions that only make sense because of the second one.
- [Three agents that don't trust each other](https://mehboob.dev/blog/three-agents-that-dont-trust-each-other/) (2026-08-19): An effort estimator built out of three subagents. The decisions that mattered were about what to withhold from each one, not what to tell them.
- [The sync job that took half a day](https://mehboob.dev/blog/the-sync-job-that-took-half-a-day/) (2026-08-18): A device sync was running 12 to 15 hours against millions of software records. The fix was batching and eager loading, but the lasting part was measuring first.
- [I used it internally for two years before publishing it](https://mehboob.dev/blog/two-years-before-i-published-it/) (2026-08-17): bitwise_attributes packs boolean flags into one integer column. Most of what makes it a library rather than a snippet came from the gap between those two things.
- [Building on a DOM that isn't mine](https://mehboob.dev/blog/building-on-a-dom-that-isnt-mine/) (2026-08-16): A 300-line Chrome extension that adds a translate button to WhatsApp Web Status. One commit fixed four bugs, and all four came from the same wrong assumption.

## Links

- Site: https://mehboob.dev
- Feed: https://mehboob.dev/rss.xml
- GitHub: https://github.com/mehboobali98
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehboobali98