Real

The slide says this, but the school still choose to give us the course 😑

@cyber_Guardian5

😂 Explanation of Human in neal.fun

I will be speaking on Clean Architecture & DDD on Monday at GDG AAU. If any of you guys are interested in the topic, you can join.

🚀 GDG AAU Open Lectures: Session #01

Is your codebase working against you ❓

We’ve all been there: a project starts off great, but as it grows, it becomes a "spaghetti" mess. You change one line of code, and three unrelated things break. Suddenly, adding a simple feature takes weeks because the logic is tangled with the database and the UI.

Join us for the very first GDG AAU #OpenLectures—a new series of deep-dive technical sessions designed to bridge the gap between academic theory and industry practice.

Topic: #CleanArchitecture & DDD
Speaker: Abenezer Alebachew (Senior CS, AAU)

Key Highlights:
📌 The Problem: Why codebases rot and how architecture stops it.
📌 Core Concepts: DDD, Layering, and Dependency Inversion.
📌 Python Pro-Tip: Using Protocols for Go-style implicit interfaces.
📌 Practicality: Real backend examples and knowing when to keep it simple.

📍 Venue: 5Kilo Campus NB 107
📅 Date: Dec 22, 2025 G.C
🕒 Time: 11:00 LT

Register Now: https://forms.gle/CqwZb4dbbr9HyidFA

For anyone who wants resources from the Clean Architecture lecture I gave, the GDG team has posted them in their group. It was a great session and I want to thank the GDG AAU
team and all who were there for making it possible

​Let’s take a painful trip down memory lane

​The year is 2016. I just graduated. My first fulltime salary? 5,400 ETB. back then, with the rate at 22 ETB/USD, that was a respectable $245

​But wait ... the dollar hasn't been sleeping either. Thanks to US inflation, that $245 in 2016 is worth about $330 today

​If we take that inflation-adjusted $330 and convert it at today’s CBE rate of 154 ETB, do you know what we get?

​💥 50,000 ETB. 💥

​The Conclusion:
To live the exact same lifestyle you had with 5,400 birr in 2016, you need to be earning 50,000 birr in 2026

​Let that sink in

Interviewing is a very important skill to have as a developer. We need to actively practice for improving our interviewing skills as developers. The way to develop interviewing skills is not just solving questions on Leetcode and calling it a day. Interviewers care about how you communicate, what kind of clarifying questions you ask and the way you break down the problem just as much if not more than your coding skills. So mock interviews are the best way to work that interviewing muscle to improve your confidence while also communicating your solution under time pressure.

I use https://www.tryexponent.com/practice for conducting mock interviews with random people around the world every weekend. I noticed that Indians are the most active on the platform and I realized why they are getting much more opportunities in the international job market compared to any other country. I have conducted 9 mock interviews on the platform as of yet and 8 of them were with Indians.

If we want to get great opportunities in the international job market, being able to do the job is not enough. We first need to get our feet in the door. After all, we can't do the job, if we are not offered the job right?😁

Let's focus on skills that get us the job just as much us the skills that allow us to be useful once we get the job.

huge effort → no quick result → frustration → burnout → stop → guilt → restart. 👎

small daily work → small progress → confidence → consistency → results → repeat. 👍

The months since November 2025 have been very amazing for me. It's like getting a big payout from a journey that was long and with very few rewards along the way.

I started programming seriously after I finished Grade 12 just before I joined AAU. In terms of work, I've had some experience with some freelance projects and a few local companies.

In October 2025, I left a job that paid me very little with nothing new to learn and with repetitive tasks.

In November 2025, I got a call from someone I met at a hackathon a year ago and I got offered a part-time job that paid 3x as much as my previous role.

This week, I got my first full-time international remote role for a US company which pays me a salary much higher than my current net worth😅. I hope to learn more from this role and to grow further.

Here are the things that helped me land the role:
1. My communication and interviewing skills which I can attribute to practicing with mock interviews and some tips I got at A2SV regarding optimizing resumes for each role.
2. My projects: I know I haven't shared much here but the projects I did at hackathons, for my own learning... were very crucial.
3. My local experience especially from my last role here. I learnt a lot and improved a lot of my skills in a very short time thanks to the thoughtful code reviews and mentorship from my previous boss.
4. My understanding of low-level, high-level and architectural concepts which I got through my time learning at ALX, books and technical blogs I've been reading

Here are some things I found useful while practicing AI-assisted development.

1. Having a guide file for the agent to refer to like Claude.md, .github/copilot.md, ...: Writing coding standards, commit formats, development workflow rules, links to spec files, docs, plans, and skill files helps very much with getting a predictable output from the agent.

2. Using skills: Anthropic has introduced skills recently and it has been a big improvement for AI-assisted development. I recommend skills related to frontend design, clean code, test-driven development, writing plans, and the framework you use. You can either install open-source skills or create your own for the agent to use and refer to.

3. Using test-driven development: Making the agent write plans and acceptance criteria, writing tests that check for the acceptance criteria, and writing minimal code to pass those tests is a much better way of working with agents in my experience.

4. Clearing the context regularly: Using a new and clear session for every different task will allow the agent to perform better as its context window will not be bloated with too much context.

4. Use MCP servers for Postman, Figma, and Playwright so that the agent can use the tools you use to get direct context for its actions.

Also, plan first, have a conversation with it to refine your plans, review its code carefully, and verify everything by testing it yourself. AI-assisted development is not going anywhere. However, understanding the context, knowing what to build, taking responsibility for the produced code, and defining a workflow that works for us are our roles.

Hope these videos help you with your system design interviews or just deepen your understanding.

If you know better resources, feel free to share them in the comments so others can benefit as well. Learning together always works better.


1. Fundamentals
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCRMIe5FDPsd0gVs500xeOewfySTsmEjf

2. API Design
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DQ57zYedMdQ

3. Load Balancing
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xg7Dj2AXLyk

4. Message Queues
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DYFocSiPOl8

5. Rate Limiting
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MIJFyUPG4Z4

6. Caching
https://youtube.com/watch?v=1NngTUYPdpI&list=PL5q3E8eRUieVFeK1oLahJ8KONkAxDpqk2&index=1

7. Sharding & Partitioning
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wXvljefXyEo

8. Database Replication
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oh8GvLf45t0

9. Consistent Hashing
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vccwdhfqIrI

10. CAP Theorem
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RexrINtVh-M

11. Microservices
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vTjeDWhjuUc

12. Fault Tolerance
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Lis4w4_bBc

13. Scalability
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tjubQ97lxA4

14. Event-Driven Architecture
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Fb_0UOD2X2I

15. Service Discovery
https://youtube.com/watch?v=v4u7m2Im7ng