Personal site of Magd Aref, full stack developer in Ontario, Canada. Notes on building software, from Spring Boot microservices and Elixir web apps to bare-metal C on STM32. https://github.com/Magd74NA/blog_and_portfolio https://magdaref.com/blog/embedded-cmake https://magdaref.com/blog/embedded-cmake Setting up one-click build and flash for STM32F446 bare-metal development with CMake and CLion on Arch Linux. Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://magdaref.com/blog/chapter6gbati https://magdaref.com/blog/chapter6gbati How I learned to work with ARM CMSIS standard by rewriting a blinky program and understanding memory-mapped peripheral structures. Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://magdaref.com/blog/chapter5gbati https://magdaref.com/blog/chapter5gbati I wrote a custom Makefile for my STM32F446 bare-metal C project, learning about target-prerequisite relationships and Make's reserved keywords along the way. Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://magdaref.com/blog/building-an-analytics-dashboard-with-sveltekit-and-cloudflare-d1 https://magdaref.com/blog/building-an-analytics-dashboard-with-sveltekit-and-cloudflare-d1 Built a self-hosted analytics dashboard that captures pageviews, enriches data with Cloudflare geo and user-agent parsing, and displays real-time stats and trends using uPlot. Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://magdaref.com/blog/on-ai-coding-part-1 https://magdaref.com/blog/on-ai-coding-part-1 AI coding tools are burning through VC capital at an unsustainable rate. What happens when the subsidies dry up and users have to pay what the tech actually costs? Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://magdaref.com/blog/stm32-linker-script-and-startup-code https://magdaref.com/blog/stm32-linker-script-and-startup-code Chapter 4 of Gbati's Bare-Metal-C: replacing the auto-generated startup assembly and linker script with hand-written C equivalents, then debugging through five attempts before the LED blinked. Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://magdaref.com/blog/stm32-bare-metal-blinky-gnu-toolchain https://magdaref.com/blog/stm32-bare-metal-blinky-gnu-toolchain Chapter 3 of Gbati's Bare-Metal-C: upgrading from a static LED to a proper blinky, then manually running each stage of the GNU ARM toolchain to see what STM32CubeIDE normally hides. Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://magdaref.com/blog/velocity-tracker-project-plan https://magdaref.com/blog/velocity-tracker-project-plan A tentative design for a barbell velocity tracker: STM32L4, a high-resolution accelerometer, e-ink display, and a CR2032 coin cell. This is the optimistic version of the plan. Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://magdaref.com/blog/dimalates-pilates-lms-phoenix-ash https://magdaref.com/blog/dimalates-pilates-lms-phoenix-ash Notes on architecting a multi-tenant learning management system for a Pilates studio in Elixir, Phoenix LiveView, and the Ash framework, including why Ash was the right call and where it pushed back. Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://magdaref.com/blog/jdextractor-local-first-job-search-cms https://magdaref.com/blog/jdextractor-local-first-job-search-cms A single Go binary that wraps a Svelte UI, an LLM-driven resume tailoring pipeline, and a filesystem-as-database job tracker. Notes on the constraints I picked and what they bought me. Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://magdaref.com/blog/stm32-bare-metal-hello-world https://magdaref.com/blog/stm32-bare-metal-hello-world First embedded foray: configuring a Nucleo F446 by reading the datasheet directly and turning on the LED 2 light, following Israel Gbati's Bare-Metal Embedded C Programming. Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT