Muayyad Alsadi

Now

Vice President of Engineering, OpenSooq

September 2015 – present · Amman, Jordan

I lead engineering where search, recommendation, data and the platform under them meet. The same standard applies in open source: a limit found in production, a fix sent upstream, and a write-up other teams can use. That record is in the official Podman project, in Docker, NGINX, Fedora and the WebAssembly runtime, and in print on Red Hat Developer, Fedora Magazine and IEEE.

• Search engine. I own search, ranking and information retrieval for OpenSooq’s classifieds marketplace.
• Recommendation systems. I develop and improve recommendation across the product.
• Data science and engineering. I build data-intensive systems and apply them to product problems.
• Backend and infrastructure. I lead the platform that runs these capabilities at scale.

Experience

I have worked with companies, products and teams that set a high technical bar.

Technical Manager, Vision Advanced Systems

July 2014 – July 2015 · Jordan

Managed development teams in Jordan and Egypt, plus the infrastructure and support team, while staying hands-on in the code.

Senior Software Technologist, Jeeran

October 2010 – August 2014

Database officer and core developer, promoted to Chief Engineer.

Open source

podman-compose

Founder and maintainer · 2019 – present

• 6.2kGitHub stars
• 630forks
• 230+contributors

As of October 2026

Runs standard Compose files (docker-compose.yml) on Podman, Red Hat’s daemonless, rootless container engine. Teams keep the stacks they already have and gain Podman’s security model: no root-owned daemon, containers running as unprivileged users. It now lives in the official containers organization, beside Podman, Buildah and Skopeo.

Any help you need with podman-compose from the podman team, please ping us. I am pointing people who come looking for compose at your project.

Daniel Walsh, 13 May 2019

How to replace #docker with #podman. @rhatdan in #Community Central at #RHSummit.

Jen Madriaga, 8 May 2019

Ojuba Linux

Lead developer of the Fedora-based Arabic Linux distribution. ojuba-org on GitHub.

Upstream

Upstream work runs from a new feature to the patch a release was waiting on. Patches sent by mail, including NGINX, Fedora, WINE and GNOME, are not all GitHub pull requests.

• 
  Docker. Years of contributions, always in the plural. An early proposal for multi-stage builds: a flat switch-root to a sub-image (moby #15271, August 2015), closer to the form Docker shipped in 17.05 than Solomon Hykes’ nested IN { } / PUBLISH (#7115). The point was to stop shipping compilers and build-time dependencies. Also a clear error when a host volume path does not start with / (#27985, 2016), and dnf download support for busybox in Fedora-Dockerfiles #171.
• 
  wasmtime-py, Bytecode Alliance. Made copying data between Python and WebAssembly linear memory 400× faster, replacing per-byte access with a direct memmove (#134, merged 2023). Proposed a further 7× faster call path (#139, open). Written up on Medium; the same bottleneck was reported to Wasmer.
• 
  NGINX. Weighted ip_hash (2012). The docs said ip_hash could not be combined with weight. Ticket #144 proposed a working algorithm, and Maxim Dounin accepted it in NGINX 1.3.1.
• 
  Fedora / RHEL, Red Hat. Proposed and implemented the MediaRepo feature. Four PackageKit patches: 277490d, 5d1dede, 9ae160e, 97ba7c6, and the freedesktop copy. Yumex. A working sysctl.d. PulseAudio: stopped a denial of service caused by flooding the logs.
• 
  Podman. Tests for parallel execution and networking (#2570) and docs pointing to third-party Compose tools (#2981), both merged in 2019.
• 
  DuckDB. PostgreSQL compatibility: simulated datallowconn / datistemplate in pg_catalog.pg_database (#22302, 2026).
• 
  scikit-learn. Upstream contribution (#10033, 2017).
• 
  Meilisearch. Issue #6365 (May 2026): documents with no embedding vector were scored as zeros, so cosine ranking could place them above real matches. The project called it a valid case for retrieval with optional media and set out a fix.
• 
  WINE. Many patches to the Windows runtime on Linux, including bug 7150.
• 
  GNOME. Patches for gnome-terminal and notification.
• 
  XML and XSLT. DocBook at xml.org (OASIS). Publican XSLT fixes (Red Hat). gnome-docs XSLT fixes.
• 
  Xapian. Fixes to the C++ search library (ticket 355). Whoosh. Contributions to the Python search engine, used in thawab. OpenStack. Contributions to cloud infrastructure.
• 
  Bootstrap. Fixed fluid thumbnails that broke after the first row (issue), and RTL support shipped as Bootstrap RTL for v2 and v3, plus rtl-xtra-rtl.css, a direction-neutral stylesheet.
• 
  Yii. Lazy sessions to limit denial of service. Caching AuthManager to stop recursive queries. CClientScript ordering. Dynamic partials so blocks can be left out of a fully cached page. I brought the Redis extension up to date. yii-EClientScript: combine and minify CSS and JavaScript with strong hash filenames based on mtime, including precompressed gzip for NGINX.
• Also. keras-ocr #39 (2020). open-headunit #1058, open-source Android Auto, a USB-service crash. jquery.smartbanner #10, Chrome on iOS. A Unicode fix in the Python LTI library (IMS LTI). The Flatpak of Othman on Flathub. I also wrote the django CMS installer, Jordanian Arabic data for arabic-mimesis, and awesome-jordan, and filed issues across Podman, TensorFlow, ClickHouse, Ansible, Consul, FreeIPA, Flatpak, Nextcloud and others: 98 issues in 57 repositories, October 2026.
  

• Accelerating stochastic gradient descent using adaptive mini-batch size

  Alsadi, Ghnemat, Awajan · IEEE ICTCS 2019 · 6 citations · doi:10.1109/ICTCS.2019.8923046

• Visualizing clustered botnet traffic using t-SNE on aggregated NetFlows

  Alsadi, Hadi · ICTCS 2017 · 7 citations · doi:10.1109/ICTCS.2017.30

• Using deep convolutional neural networks and knowledge transfer for image recognition

  M.Sc. thesis, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, 2018 · ProQuest 28022724 · 2 citations

Writing

Published on Red Hat Developer, Fedora Magazine, the Project Atomic blog (Red Hat; now Fedora CoreOS) and Medium.

• Moving hot loops from Python to WASM won’t be feasible without this trick

  Medium · March 2023 · made calling WebAssembly from Python about 25× faster in the end-to-end benchmark; the ctypes.memmove fix became wasmtime-py #134. The same profile holds a two-part series on writing a database engine (May and June 2024), randomness in a ranking algorithm (February 2023), and serving files in Python after FastAPI failed a case (February 2023).

• Building Smaller Container Images

  Fedora Magazine · 16 May 2019 · a Node.js image 170 MB smaller (47%), using fedora-minimal and microdnf, one-layer cleanup, an undocumented modularity file for microdnf, and a multi-stage Podman build of a static Go binary.

• How does Atomic run system containers without Docker Daemon?

  Project Atomic blog · 5 March 2018 · pull with Skopeo, store with OSTree, run with an OCI runtime, so etcd and flanneld can start before any Docker daemon.

• Make Firefox Quantum look native in Fedora 27

  Fedora Magazine · 2017

• New level of automation with Ansible

  Red Hat Developer · 7 June 2017 · why declarative, repeatable playbooks replace Bash scripts that break on the second run.

Community

Stack Overflow reviewer

Custodian · 15 years · about 1.6k reputation · 2.2 million people reached

The public record is practical answers across Python, the web, containers and PHP. On Electrical Engineering, a Famous Question gold badge (a question past 10,000 views) and two Notable Question badges, on AVR clocks and timers. On Server Fault, the highest-reaching post off Stack Overflow is on making a Docker application write to stdout. Data Science and Software Engineering are on the same network account. Also Custodian twice, Citizen Patrol, Editor, Critic, Teacher, Scholar, Supporter.

GitHub: 90 public repositories and 261 followers, in ojuba-org and OpenSooq, Arctic Code Vault Contributor. X / Twitter. Open source since 2002. Arabic (native) and English.

Education

M.Sc. Computer Science, Excellent. Princess Sumaya University for Technology, 2015–2018. Thesis on deep convolutional neural networks and knowledge transfer for image recognition, linked above.

B.Sc. Mathematics, Excellent. The Hashemite University, 2000–2004.

Mirantis Certified OpenStack Administrator (MCA100, credential 100-172) and Instructor (~2015).

Range

Search and data. Information retrieval, ranking, recommendation, machine learning, data engineering. Systems. Linux, containers, distributed systems, databases, networking, performance. Low level. Assembly and microcontrollers when the limit is the machine: a WebAssembly runtime, or a bare AVR. Languages. C and C++, Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Java, and Go, plus JavaScript and SQL. From super-powered clusters to the least-powered Arduino. From the web to the backend. From CSS to algorithms.

Projects

• containerized-gui-wayland

  A full Linux desktop in one container: a Wayland compositor with wayvnc, reachable from a browser. Base image for packaging any GUI app the same way.

• containerized-xorg-spice

  The X11 predecessor: a remote X desktop in a container over SPICE, with an HTML5 client.

• docker-balancer

  A dynamic HAProxy load balancer driven by Docker events.

• docker-jumpshell

  A secure SSH jump box into Docker containers, with access control lists.

• UniVarUInts

  Compact variable-length unsigned integers, tighter than Protocol Buffers’ VarInt. C, Python, JavaScript.

• othman

  A Quran browser and search, indexed with UniVarUInts. Also released on Flathub.

• avr_sound

  Compressed audio on a bare AVR or Arduino through two digital pins and an R-2R ladder. Audio lives in flash, about 2 KB per second, because the chip has too little RAM to hold it. Includes a Python converter from audio to C headers. Written up on Instructables (2014 – present).

• thawab

  A Whoosh search engine for Arabic and Islamic literature.

• RtlCss

  A right-to-left CSS override generator, used by Bootstrap RTL for v2 and v3.

• php-lite-solr

  A lightweight Solr client and library for PHP.

• ajax-ops

  Declarative AJAX operations with internationalization support.

• python-PooledProcessMixIn

  A fast concurrent mixin: a pool of pre-forked processes and threads for Python socket servers.

• yii-EClientScript

  Minify and combine JavaScript and CSS for Yii.

Consulting

2008–2010 and ~2015, I consulted, on my own and with a client’s team.Production cloud included almost all Amazon Web Services, and other vendors. Docker was made fit for production the same way: by joining the project and closing the gaps, instead of waiting for the product to grow up. I am a Mirantis Certified OpenStack administrator and instructor.

• Optimize a web stack: Apache, NGINX, Varnish, HAProxy, PHP, Ruby, Python, Node.js.
• Deploy and tune open-source applications, including WordPress and Magento.
• Scale an application: decouple components, load-balance work, replicate databases and files, adopt the cloud.
• Automate deployment and workflow with Fabric and Ansible, including dry runs and rolling deploys.
• Analyze a setup and its code and find the bottleneck.
• Analyze an Android application.
• Manage a team, or develop alone or inside one.
• Work across backends, web front ends, and Android.
• Set up, deploy and develop enterprise software: LDAP, FreeIPA, mail servers, ERP.
• Build real-time data applications, and design an algorithm for the specific case.