Youcef Rabia
Software developer. JavaScript and C++ expert.
about
I write JavaScript for a living and C for the love of it. My favorite projects are the ones where I rebuild a tool I use every day β a JSON engine, a regex engine β from nothing, just to see exactly what's under the floorboards.
I've shipped NestJS microservices with Kafka and Docker at Emploitic, spent two years freelancing across the MERN stack, and studied software engineering at LETI in Saint Petersburg before coming back to Algiers, where I'm now studying hydraulic engineering at USTHB while working in tech part-time.
I contribute to open source when I can β including a contribution to the official TypeScript website, validated by Jake Bailey himself. Daily drivers: Arch Linux, Neovim, and a terminal.
My workflow leans hard on AI β I let it build fast, then I test, debug, and rebuild the result by hand until I understand and control every line. Deployment I keep boring on purpose: Vercel, Railway, and Neon handle the ops so I can stay in the code.
experience
Building internal automations, maintaining and fixing the company website, and developing new digital services β notably around the company's expansion into the hotel sector.
Building and running the wholesale charger storefront end to end β Next.js front, Node/Express + Prisma/PostgreSQL back β while managing the brand's social media presence.
Two years of client work across the MERN stack: React frontends, Node/Express APIs, MongoDB data layers β scoped, built, shipped, and maintained solo.
Built microservices in NestJS with TypeScript, communicating over Kafka and shipped in Docker, against both MongoDB and PostgreSQL. First serious dose of OOP architecture at production scale.
projects
vanilla-json
A JSON engine written from scratch in pure JavaScript.
Hand-written tokenizer, recursive descent parser, and serializer β no eval, no native JSON.* anywhere in the implementation. Matches native behavior down to the weird parts: NaN β null, dropped undefined keys, circular-reference TypeErrors, position-aware SyntaxErrors. Published on npm, with its own hand-built documentation site that doubles as a tutorial for writing your own.
better-regex
A regex engine built from scratch β parser + backtracking matcher.
No native RegExp, no dependencies. A recursive descent parser turns the pattern into a tree, then a backtracking matcher walks it against the input, backing off when greedy quantifiers overshoot β the same mechanism that powers real-world engines. Supports alternation, quantifiers, wildcards, and fully nested groups. Published on npm.
NFA-based regex engine
The same problem, solved the computer-science way: Thompson's construction.
Every regex operation becomes a tiny state machine glued together with Ξ΅-transitions; a postfix expression is folded with a stack until one NFA remains. Runs all paths in parallel and never backtracks β the automata-theory counterpart to better-regex, built to understand both halves of how regex engines are made.
Everything About Pointers
A compile-everything reference for pointers in C and C++.
A working reference where every section is code you can actually compile β pointer arithmetic, void*, pointers to pointers, arrays vs. pointers, 2-D and jagged arrays, stack vs. heap, and a hand-rolled memory allocation exercise β all built with -Wall -Wextra and AddressSanitizer wired in, because most pointer bugs are silent until they aren't. It ships with a Makefile, CI smoke tests, and a small htmx web server that serves the whole thing as a browsable book. I wrote it while studying software engineering at LETI in Saint Petersburg, and it ended up circulating among students there as study material β the thing I'm proudest of about it.
skills
JavaScript is my main power β the rest orbits around it.
Languages
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- C
- Assembly
- Python
- SQL
Backend
- Node.js
- NestJS
- Express
- Kafka
- Prisma
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
Frontend
- React
- Next.js
- Tailwind
- htmx
- vanilla DOM
Environment
- Arch Linux
- Neovim / vim
- Docker
- Git
- Make
Deploy
- Vercel
- Railway
- Neon
articles
Build your own JSON serializer 2025How to write JSON.stringify from scratch in pure JavaScript β escaping strings the hard way, the primitive types, toJSON, and circular references. From the vanilla-json docs.
certificates
Six-month intensive full-stack JavaScript bootcamp.
All 10 episodes β mental models of how JavaScript actually works.
Functions, prototypes, classes, sets & maps, error handling, async, the event loop.
Command line, shell scripting, permissions, I/O redirection, processes, packages.
Fundamentals, data structures, control flow, exceptions, debugging.
File I/O, text processing, data analysis, CLI arguments β a real project end to end.
beyond the code
Literature & philosophy
A big Dostoevsky fan β my favorite of his is A Raw Youth, which most people skip and shouldn't. Two years living between Saint Petersburg and Moscow made the Russians feel less like reading and more like memory.
Watchmaking
Vacheron Constantin and Patek Philippe are the poles of my compass; the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso is my favorite watch ever made. Working for one of these houses one day is an actual goal, not a daydream β it's the same obsession as low-level code: small parts, exact tolerances, nothing hidden.
Machines, all the way down
I like understanding the full stack in the literal sense β hardware up through assembly, C, and the runtimes on top. It's why I keep rebuilding tools from scratch: the floor should never be mysterious.
Geopolitics
I follow how power, resources, and technology redraw the map β supply chains, energy, spheres of influence. Having lived between Algiers, Saint Petersburg, and Moscow, I've watched the same events narrated three different ways, and that gap is exactly what fascinates me.
AI & humanity
I think a lot about what AI does to us β to work, to learning, to who gets left behind. I use it daily as a force multiplier, but the interesting question isn't what the models can do; it's what we become when we lean on them. I want to be part of answering that well.