Charif Mews

Full Stack Developer

I develop creative, highly interactive, modern web apps with cutting edge technologies. My passion is achieving the best user experience and app performance. Last but not least I strive to protect users their privacy by keeping an eye out for security issues.

Skills

Skills are abilities to do something very well, others call it a synonym of expertise. The problem in web development is that the skills I put on this website will be quickly outdated, because the evolution in the digital world goes in a extremely fast pace. Further more it invites bias in choosing the right technology stack when I say that for front-end development I only use Meteor, Angular 2, Cycle.js, GSAP or React. Frameworks and libraries are easily learned and in my opinion should never count like a skill. The skills that matter are the general skills that a good developer needs. Like problem solving, critical thinking, debugging, abstract thinking, but also how you communicate with other (technical and non-technical) people. The programming languages I prefer to write code in are the following:

JavaScript

I really like the JavaScript language, because JavaScript is the de facto language of the web. With Babel and TypeScript the way to write JavaScript has improved significantly. While everybody is on the hype train of React, I prefer Angular 2 (TypeScript is an important reason), Cycle.js (functional programming with Observables) or just vanilla JS (for small projects), but it depends on the project. For animations I like to use GSAP and/or just plain CSS. NodeJS is my default choice for back-end development and the framework I prefer to use is hapi.js.

Python

I use Python for data analysis in Apache Spark for big data sets or Pandas for small data sets.

Elixir (Erlang)

This is the programming language that excites me the most and where I learned a lot of functional programming concepts. I really like fault-tolerant and cheap processes approach and will hopefully use it in a production project this year.

Swift

Did some Objective-C programming in the past and did not like that, but Swift is a great improvement and makes developing apps great. I have to say that Ionic 2 is the best option to create simple apps fast, however if you need more performance or advanced features than Swift is the way to go.

Portfolio

I have made a yearly selection of projects I developed in the past three years and the project I am currently working on:


Quantum Login is an open source project in progress, however this website is open source too and I invite you to have a look at the source code:

Security

This is a notoriously hard field for most developers and it took me some time to grasp all the attack possibilities. Clickjacking, XSS, (No)SQL injection, information leakage and command execution to name a few, I try to find and fix the weak spots in every area I know there exist an offensive possibility against the users or the servers of the company. I fixed over 100 security weak points for many clients in the last years. It's guaranteed that this will stay private as long there was no database breach and you don't have to warn users. If you are interested in a security audit, you can contact me for more information.

Cryptography

I am extremely worried about the state of cryptography. The reason is when the breakthrough arrives in the quantum computing field almost all the public key cryptography we use today will broken with Shor's Algorithm. That's why I'm researching post-quantum cryptography and started the Quantum Login Initiative.

Public Speaker

I love to teach people how to protect their privacy. In the last year I spoke/debated many times across the Netherlands about privacy, politics, innovation, education, web development and cybersecurity. If you are interested to invite me as a speaker, you can contact me for more information. I also tweet sometimes and you can if you like.

Machine Learning

I'm very intrigued with machine learning and did some coding/research in supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning. In the future I want to learn more about deep learning and advanced pattern recognition algorithms.