# Smakosh — Ismail Ghallou

> Smakosh: A self-taught designer and developer dedicated to creating tech solutions that make a difference. Passionate about open source, startups, and building impactful side projects.

Self-taught designer & developer from Morocco, currently based in Lund, Sweden. Personal site with essays, talks, side projects and open-source work.

For the complete site contents in a single document, see [https://smakosh.com/llms-full.txt](https://smakosh.com/llms-full.txt).

## About

- [About me](https://smakosh.com/about.md): Bio, current focus, ways to get in touch.
- [Contact](https://smakosh.com/contact): Email, social links, and how to start a project together.
- [Resume](https://smakosh.com/resume): Up-to-date professional resume.

## Essays

- [All essays (index)](https://smakosh.com/blog.md): Index of every long-form essay.
- [Attending Next Conf 2023](https://smakosh.com/blog/next-conf-2023.md): Next Conf is an annual conference that is organized by the team at Vercel during which they showcase what’s new in Next.js, what has been do…
- [2021 year in review](https://smakosh.com/blog/2021-in-year-review.md): Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash 2021 was an immersive year for me, After quitting my full time job at 4D in early November 2020, I was ac…
- [How to make an NFT](https://smakosh.com/blog/how-to-make-an-nft.md): You can collect this article as an NFT Here As there is a new trend these days and as I’ve been working on this area recently, I thought of …
- [2020 year in review](https://smakosh.com/blog/2020-in-year-review.md): I haven't published any article during this year which is unfortunate as it's been an overwhelming one for me but not exactly due to the pan…
- [2019 year in review](https://smakosh.com/blog/2019-in-year-review.md): I managed to achieve in 2019 much more of what I've done in 2018, here's an overview of what I have learned, created & some random facts. Le…
- [Get paid while you're learning, working at a startup](https://smakosh.com/blog/get-paid-while-you-are-learning-working-at-a-startup.md): Life update If you haven't read my previous article about the visas rejections, I'd recommend you to do so as I mentioned there that I switc…
- [Webview native authentication in React Native](https://smakosh.com/blog/webview-native-authentication.md): TL;DR: - React Native App: <https://github.com/smakosh/article-auth-app - React web app: <https://github.com/smakosh/article-auth-web - REST…
- [Getting my third visa rejection](https://smakosh.com/blog/visa-rejections-stories.md): My application visa into the Schengen territory has just got denied for the third time in a row, before I mention the reasons and their stup…
- [15 Days working from Bali](https://smakosh.com/blog/15-days-working-from-bali.md): I'm writing this article in my room back home, thankfully I arrived safely and I had to take some rest by calling on my grandma in a not so …
- [Handling SEO in React apps](https://smakosh.com/blog/seo-in-react-apps.md): I have landed successfully in Bali, rented a scooter and been enjoying my ride from my place to Dojo Bali where I'm currently writing this a…
- [Penang was way better](https://smakosh.com/blog/penang-was-way-better.md): As promised before when I shared my experience spending one month in KL as a remote developer, It's time to share with you how was Penang co…
- [One month in Kuala Lumpur as a remote developer](https://smakosh.com/blog/one-month-in-kuala-lumpur-as-a-remote-developer.md): I won’t consider myself a digital nomad yet, but I admit that I was a bit influenced to try out that lifestyle, but as I don’t like travelin…
- [Solving hashtags problems](https://smakosh.com/blog/solving-hashtags-problems.md): Hashtag hashtags is the plural noun is any phrase or word that has a '' sign at the beginning, it is mostly used on social media platforms t…
- [How To add dark mode easily with a custom React hook](https://smakosh.com/blog/how-to-add-dark-mode-easily-with-a-custom-react-hook.md): 2024's Update: just use Next themes In this quick article, I will be implementing dark mode to a quick React app with a custom React hook, B…
- [2018 year review](https://smakosh.com/blog/2018-year-review.md): 2018 was for me the most productive year so far, so I've decided to write an article at the beginning of each new year highlighting few achi…
- [One year working remotely](https://smakosh.com/blog/one-year-working-remotely.md): Remember the last time I shared with you my story when I declined the job offer as a front end developer then won the first prize at a hacka…
- [From failure to launch - Hajj Hackathon](https://smakosh.com/blog/from-failure-to-launch-hajj-hackathon.md): While travelling to Rabat in order to visit the Moroccan office of Obytes (the company I work for), I got invited to participate in Hajj hac…
- [We are truly living in a simulation](https://smakosh.com/blog/we-are-truly-living-in-a-simulation.md): Not that kind of simulation you’ve seen on the matrix movie but a different one, keep on reading to understand more. The simulation I’m talk…
- [The tech tools I use](https://smakosh.com/blog/the-tech-tools-I-use.md): A list of tools I use for: - Personal side projects - Full time job - Working with clients Design tools - Midjourney for logo, icon and illu…
- [My trip to Istanbul and why I hate traveling](https://smakosh.com/blog/istanbul-trip.md): I wanted to visit Istanbul 3 years ago and even told my friends about it, but 2 years after that moment, I didn’t really want to travel anyw…
- [Why I created Unnamed](https://smakosh.com/blog/unnamed.md): I hate when I use a known css framework like Skeleton or Bulma… and specially frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation… Because of many reaso…
- [Build your perceptron neural net from scratch](https://smakosh.com/blog/build-your-perceptron.md): “ In the late ’50s, a Cornell scientist named Frank Rosenblatt had proposed the world’s first neural network machine. It was called the Perc…
- [First time getting first prize at a hackathon](https://smakosh.com/blog/first-time-first-prize.md): As I always do, to arrive at time I stay awake the whole night, so I spent that night coding & designing like most of my days. So after I de…
- [Getting my first job offer without a degree at a startup](https://smakosh.com/blog/getting-my-first-job-offer.md): It all started on facebook, I was reading Tech crunch news until a notification popped up, my friend Med Bouasria tagged me on a job announc…
- [HPS Hackathon](https://smakosh.com/blog/hps-hackathon.md): After winning the second prize at the Lydec Hackathon organized by Screendy. I got invited to join the student partner program of Screendy —…
- [How I learned Design and Dev in a year and half](https://smakosh.com/blog/how-I-learned-design-and-dev.md): I started Learning Design 1st - I learned Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop --Then Adobe XD later on-- easily since I was playing with Adobe Aft…
- [Never work for free](https://smakosh.com/blog/never-work-for-free.md): It was the first time I work for free since it was my English teacher for whom I promised to make an entire dynamic website in which he woul…
- [About me so far...](https://smakosh.com/blog/about-me-so-far.md): The story of my nickname "Smakosh" I’m Ismail Ghallou also known as Smakosh, a nickname which was given to me since I was 8 years old by one…

## Talks

- [All talks (index)](https://smakosh.com/talks.md): Conference and meetup talks with slides and recordings.
- [Handling Server & Client State in your React App](https://pitch.com/public/0632c507-3ca0-4a56-8b36-0582bb9e2ff6): At an offline event in Berlin, I gave this tech talk about handling client and server state in your React apps, in which I started with an introduction of state management, how important is it to manage state properly, different types of state, different ways to manage both types of states and ended up with a little introduction to Tanstack-query with some examples of fetching and mutating data.
- [Learn to implement authentication cheaply and securely](https://2021.custom-auth.talks.smakosh.com): An online workshop on which I shared my knowledge about the different approaches to implement authentication, the pros and cons of each with a demo at the end implementing session http only cookie authentication using the hype beast.
- [WTH is static site regeneration](https://2020.wth-isg.talks.smakosh.com/): Quick explanation of Icremental Static Regeneration using Next js, I explained the difference between SSG vs SSR vs CSR vs ISR, gave an introduction about Next js, I went through Next's 3 API functions one by one and showed a demo of Ontwik.dev and how are we using ISR for listing approved developers and their profiles.
- [Gatsby js talk and workshop](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10UJ2G8CbcZK6EUHKA-MHsNxJwDgLPYH6C06sceeVPAw/edit?usp=sharing): In this talk, I re-introduced Gatsby as a modern web framework for building blazing fast websites and apps, answered the "what? why and how?" questions with a demo at the end, built a blog and deployed to ZEIT now.
- [Build a blog with Contentful and Gatsby](https://2020.headless-cms.talks.smakosh.com/): talked about headless CMS, why it's better than traditional CMS, micro introduction to Gatsby, what's the JAMStack...
- [The evolution of grid systems on the web](https://2020.css-grids-talk.talks.smakosh.com/): talked about CSS Grid systems, the reason we need them, life before/after CSS and the clearfix hack, flexBox and CSS Grid
- [Introducing Gatsby, — The modern web framework for building blazing fast websites and apps.](https://zeit-gatsby-talk.smakosh.com/): In this talk, I re-introduced Gatsby as a modern web framework for building blazing fast websites and apps, answered the "what? why and how?" questions with a demo at the end of a static website consuming data from a single YAML file and deployed to ZEIT now in less than 10s.
- [Building static & dynamic apps with Gatsby](https://building-apps-with-gatsby.netlify.com/): In this talk, I covered the same points I mentioned in my previous Gatsby talk as most of the attendees haven't any idea what Gatsby was, then I jumped into the dynamic Not Todo app I built during that morning which is connected to a REST API built quickly with express & mongoDB, I went through how to setup the routes using reach-router & how to use the "createPages" Gatsby API to create that page (since it's a SPA, there is only one page generated).
- [Introducing Gatsby, the best SSG for React developers.](https://introducing-gatsby.netlify.com/#0): In this talk, I introduced Gatsby to developers, which is one of the three choices you'd consider when building a React app, it offers pre-rendering, has a huge community who have shipped many Gatsby plugins that help make the process easy, I discussed about what's so awesome about it, how it renders content & built a blog with markdown files in 5 minutes live coding with the attendees.
- [The Perceptron - Understanding the maths under the hood](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YTl4g36z22bJJmzfHtNd9QEibeotgNmieikO6G7gK3U/edit?usp=sharing): During this talk, I covered a brief history about Ai, defined ML/DL & explained the difference between the two, started by recognizing an unknown type of flower from basic data we collected and how intuition managed to draw a line between the two types of flowers from our dataset, then I moved on to automate what we manually did and ended up making a Perceptron from scratch.

## Projects

- [Heron Finance](https://www.heronfinance.com): The returns of stocks, the consistency of bonds.
- [Diagonal Finance Landing page](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXy_Ur1dfJQ): Diagonal is the the most powerful API for crypto payments. Integrate crypto subscriptions in just a few lines of code, and get paid on multiple chains and in multiple tokens
- [Diagonal Finance Checkout page](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXy_Ur1dfJQ): Diagonal's Checkout page
- [Diagonal Finance Demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXy_Ur1dfJQ): Diagonal's Demo, Diagonal is the the most powerful API for crypto payments. Integrate crypto subscriptions in just a few lines of code, and get paid on multiple chains and in multiple tokens
- [Links DAO Landing page](https://linksdao.io/): A global community of golf enthusiasts in web3 reimagining the modern golf and leisure club
- [Ontwik](https://ontwik-dev.com): Hire skilled remote developers easily.
- [Links DAO Clubhouse](https://clubhouse.linksdao.io/): A global community of golf enthusiasts in web3 reimagining the modern golf and leisure club
- [The Landing](https://landing.space): A community for visual inspiration, curation, and design.
- [Mintify](https://mintify.smakosh.com): Easily deploy your ERC 721 smart contract and mint NFTs from different sources like Unsplash
- [Ai Hashtags](https://ai-hashtags.com): Generate Hashtags using Artificial Intelligence
- [Uvohealth](https://www.uvohealth.com/): Free telemedicine software. See patients anywhere anytime.
- [Unnamed CSS](https://unnamed.smakosh.com): A colorful CSS framework
- [Obytes](https://obytes.com): Obytes landing page
- [Joincoded](https://www.joincoded.com): The First Coding Bootcamp in the Middle East
- [Couscous](https://www.couscous.bot): Slack bot inspired by HeyTaco
- [Catch it 1.0](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smakosh.atchit): Fun Android game I made in one night
- [Barmej](https://www.barmej.com): An Arabic online learning platform that offers courses in different programing languages.
- [Diagonal Finance Subscriptions Dashboard](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXy_Ur1dfJQ): Diagonal's Subscriptions Dashboard, Diagonal is the the most powerful API for crypto payments. Integrate crypto subscriptions in just a few lines of code, and get paid on multiple chains and in multiple tokens
- [LLM Gateway](https://llmgateway.io?ref=smakosh.com): Open-source alternative of Openrouter
- [WaifuPixel](https://waifupixel.com?ref=smakosh.com): Transform your photos into stunning anime-style artwork with AI.
- [Starlink Prices](https://starlink-prices.com?ref=smakosh.com): Browse global Starlink plans and prices in your local currency.

## Optional

- [RSS feed](https://smakosh.com/rss.xml): Subscribe to new essays.
- [Atom feed](https://smakosh.com/atom): Atom format feed.
- [Sitemap](https://smakosh.com/sitemap.xml): XML sitemap of all pages.
- [Tags index](https://smakosh.com/tags): Browse essays by topic.