Alex Sharif's Personal Web-page

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Welcome to my web-page. Please use the navigation pane in the bar above to navigate this single-page site.

About Me

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I enjoy data analytics, trying out new restaurants, traveling, calligraphy and meeting new people. My favorite part of the United States is my homeland of New England due to the diverse geographical features present within the area, such as the Berkshires mountain range, and rich cultural history present within the region (half of the Ivy League is located within the region and the southwestern portion of New England comprises part of the New York metropolitan area due to its adjacency to New York City).

Also, to tie back into restaurants, the region is home to the finest Italian-American cuisine outside of New York City.

I am passionate about learning about new technologies and helping people realize their potential through technological means. I can daily-drive a Linux distribution if needed, and show you how to as well.

I am interested in technological entrepreneurship and enjoy helping people with their technological needs. If you are a consumer that is in need of help regarding one of the services listed on this page, please do not hesitate to reach out to me via e-mail.

I enjoy reading non-fictional books about philosophy, technology, and science. I also enjoy photography, calligraphy, and writing in my journal. I am also trying to get back into amateur music production (sadly, my tracks are not fire yet).

Nota bene: I am not an active contributor to all of the aforementioned projects nor do I endorse them. I mostly use them to facilitate goals as an end user.

Areas of Experience

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• POSIX™*-compliant and Linux Systems Management
  • Disk Imaging
    • dd
    • mkisofs
    • xorriso
    • cfdisk
    • fdisk
  • File Carving, Disk Forensics, and Data Recovery
    • testdisk
    • photorec
    • scalpel
• DevOps and Cloud Tools
  • Ansible
  • OpenTofu
  • Amazon Web Services familiarity
  • Google Cloud familiarity
  • Azure familiarity
• Data Analytics and Visualization
  • Python
    • Pandas
    • Numpy
    • matplotlib
    • Seaborn
  • R
    • DPYLR
    • TIDYVerse
    • R-Whisker
    • Bioconductor
• Secure Software Development
  • Containerization Solutions
    • Apptainer and Singularity
    • Podman
    • Docker
    • Application container solutions for high-performance computing environments would often have to be created to satisfy the tight constraints of a research environment.
  • Static application security testing tools (SAST)
  • Source-code linting
  • Git version control protocol

I have expertise in the following languages:

• C++
• C
• Python
• Go
• R
• ECMAScript (JavaScript™**)
• POSIX™* compliant shell scripting
  • Bourne Again Shell (bash)
  • Bourne Shell (sh)
  • Z-Shell (zsh)

*: POSIX™ is a trademark of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). The creator of this website does not intend to infringe upon this trademark and is not affiliated with the IEEE as of this writing. Usage on this website is purely for referential purposes.

**: JavaScript™ is a trademark of Oracle® Corporation. ECMAScript is the standard that JavaScript™ is based upon. The creator of this website does not intend to infringe upon this trademark and is not affiliated with Oracle® Corporation as of this writing. Usage on this website is purely for referential purposes.

Project Highlights

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Food Econometrics Project

• Professional or Personal: Personal and Academic
• Status: Ongoing
• Source Code Availability: Available upon request

• Python
• R
• SQLite
• SQL(Other dialects)

• Pandas
  • https://pypi.org/project/pandas/
• Requests
  • https://pypi.org/project/requests/
• Docker
  • https://www.docker.com/

This was a project used to monitor human-readable changes of an HTML web-page at regular time intervals via the Requests module and converted to human-readable text. It was mostly used for monitoring Wikipedia edits to pages as they occurred (particularly those articles subject to an "edit war").

Website Change Detection

• Professional or Personal: Personal
• Status: Completed
• Source Code Availability: Available upon request

• Python

• BeautifulSoup4 (BS4)
  • https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/
• Requests
  • https://pypi.org/project/requests/
• Docker
  • https://www.docker.com/

This was a project used to monitor human-readable changes of an HTML web-page at regular time intervals via the Requests module and converted to human-readable text. It was mostly used for monitoring Wikipedia edits to pages as they occurred (particularly those articles subject to an "edit war").

Data Accounting System

• Professional or Personal: Professional
• Status: Operational
• Source Code Availability: Confidential

• Python
• R
• PostgreSQL

• {{mustache}} for R, Logic-less Templating
  • https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/whisker/index.html
• Pandas
  • https://pypi.org/project/pandas/
• Requests
  • https://pypi.org/project/requests/
• Docker
  • https://www.docker.com/
• Compose Specification
  • https://www.compose-spec.io/

This was a project used to monitor and account for data storage for various employee working groups and organizational sub-divisions. This was an end-to-end solution that calculated the amount of storage data utilized and emailed respective stakeholders at the individual and managerial level. This project utilized data cleaning, ingestion of various data sources, PostgreSQL Common Table Expressions (CTEs), and management of data via R and Python pandas data frames. To accelerate build times, this also made use of multi-stage builds to limit wasted time to realize the final product.

Frequently Asked Questions

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1. Question: Why is this a static website?
   • Answer: This is a personal website meant to showcase my work and abilities. While I may be capable of making an ECMAScript site, the benefits of ease of uniformity, maintenance, and a small data footprint, outweighs the cost of maintaining a flashy dynamic site.
2. Question: Why does the website look so plain?
   • Answer: Ever wonder why fast food companies use attractive colors in their logos? Sometimes, bad things come in good packages (Source). In all seriousness though, this site is only about 75.61 IEC kilobytes (77.42 SI kilobytes) [Note: 1024 bytes = 1 IEC Kilobyte; 1000 bytes = 1 SI Kilobyte ] and if I were to self-host, data egress transfer to you, the viewer(s), would be minimized.
3. Question: Why not use a static site generator?
   • Answer: I have actually been considering this, but I have not had the time to look into this. If you have any recommendations, please feel free to reach out.
4. Question: Why do you not show your face?
   • Answer: As mentioned previously near the top of the page, AI deep-fakes are a thing. I would not want my likeness copied for fraudulent purposes, so I exercised a degree of trepidation regarding the sharing of my online information. If you have met me "in the flesh", then you will likely recognize my face from the obfuscated image near the top of this web-page anyway.
5. Question: Do you have a GPG key?
   • Answer: Of course. Please find them below. The shorter block is an elliptic-curve cryptographic (Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm, Curve25519) key and the longer block is a traditional RSA key. Only use the one block that best satisfies your needs. Please consult the GNU Privacy Handbook

     -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
     
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     AokhWxTXOfi8polSRAEApfA02qZzt9F09Hs0cimKvPYypiuc52uOEIcZ3tvo0wg=
     =fVCm
     -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
     

     -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
     
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     Bet+IQRliO2hRow5FoQ=
     =KLeq
     -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
     

6. Question: How do I quickly send you an encrypted email?
   • Answer: If you lack the time to read the GNU Privacy Guide, then please perform the following steps.
     1. Save one of the GPG keys listed above to a file called AlexSharif.pub.
     2. To import the key, run gpg --import AlexSharif.pub
     3. Compose a message and save it as an appropriate file with a distinct name (for example ) message.txt.
     4. Execute the command gpg --armor --encrypt --recipient alexander.a.sharif@gmail.com message.txt
     5. If you have performed the following correctly, then an ASCII armored file called message.txt.asc should appear in whatever working directory you ran the command listed above in. The encrypted file message.txt.asc is the cipher text that can be securely sent to me via email.
7. Question: How do I send you an encrypted email so I too can get in on the fun?
   • Answer: If you lack the time to read the GNU Privacy Guide, then please perform the following steps.
     1. Run the following code to generate your public-private key pair: gpg --full-generate-key.
     2. Enter the required information such as your name and, most importantly the email that you plan to use (GPG operates primarily on email identifiers).
     3. Compose a message and save it as an appropriate file with a distinct name (for example ) message.txt.
     4. Execute the command gpg --armor --encrypt --recipient alexander.a.sharif@gmail.com message.txt
     5. If you have performed the following correctly, then an ASCII armored file called message.txt.asc should appear in whatever working directory you ran the command listed above in. Since the encrypted file message.txt.asc is the cipher text that can be securely sent to me via email and decrypted using my secret key, two way secure communications can now be established.
8. Question: How do I know if a message actually originated from an individual in that they have signed off on it?
   • Answer: You can sign and encrypt messages to prove authenticity. You sign with your private key which must always remain private. Others encrypt messages to you with your public key which should remain public and maintained. For example: gpg --armor --encrypt --sign --recipient alexander.a.sharif@gmail.com mess shows

     -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
     
     hF4DYu7Xpz9tDm4SAQdARrXpwfUAxIOd4hne75zGxMmPeO97tXHREARe7r6Q10Ew
     vVrlwsDfT6P9Z/uYPf6C4V71yKJgqZdxT/m746FkZG/ZsxcqWJRLAnaXtVwyTIJV
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     iGbd8X0mCjx3dUk5oDsZg2kIgCdTvdEFBz2uGiL7QmC6+GxQtxsfG/HHqQ==
     =Lc3t
     -----END PGP MESSAGE-----

     and subsequent decryption of the message shows both the original plaintext and the signature validity string as follows: gpg --armor --decrypt --recipient alexander.a.sharif@gmail.com mess.asc Hello. gpg: Signature made Thu Aug 21 09:41:10 2025 EDT gpg: using RSA key 8A54728AA645C8E675B3C06A2D2BB647DEC09581 gpg: Good signature from "Alexander Sharif <alexander.a.sharif@gmail.com>" [ultimate] The "Ultimate" key trust implies that it is essentially you communicating with yourself. You can also use commands like gpg --clearsign sample (sample is the document being signed) that maintains unencrypted content and a signature block. For example, consider the output of the previous command from sample.asc document from the fictitious person Judge Q. Public (Note that the message is also hashed):

     -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
     Hash: SHA256
     
     To Whom It May Concern,
     
     This is being made official.
     
     Regards,
     
     Judge Q. Public
     -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
     
     iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEEilRyiqZFyOZ1s8BqLSu2R97AlYEFAminO7YACgkQLSu2R97A
     lYFWAA/+OudBuLH+0yOdEs4OfB3ZkATLMftQgaYZThwrcLZ0whjZdV8mtLJw4M4D
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     0jhxJ+bUmLqh5AtHufdTnaD/WILER4I/tBFtrSxc7kHeO1jCZ+c=
     =RqPB
     -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- 

GPG Information

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This is firstly, a personal website. While GPG is one of my favorite technologies, I have unfortunately contributed nothing to the project other than spread awareness of how it can and should be used. Therefore, I am including a list of common references for the GPG security and security in general:

1. The GPG Privacy Manual (Contains much more technical knowledge and examples in the FAQ of this site; Copyright © 1999 by The Free Software Foundation and licensed under the "GNU Free Documentation License" the full text of which can be found here as I believe it will be of benefit to many.)
2. A useful GPG crib-sheet ( "edoceo" ® is a registered trademark of Edoceo, Inc. All content is © 1999-2024 Edoceo, Inc and I am not the copyright holder of this material as he believes it holds educative value in the spirit of fair use)

Contact Information

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• GitHub: aasharif
  • https://github.com/aasharif
• E-mail Address: alexander.a.sharif@gmail.com
  • Send an e-mail to me. I would be more than happy to converse via teleconferencing or in-person to prove that I am authentic. : ^ )

Copyrighted by Alexander Sharif, all rights reserved unless otherwise stated. 2025 (© 2025)

Disclaimer

This website is provided for informational purposes only. No warranty is expressed or implied. Use the information at your own risk; the author is not responsible for any damage or data loss resulting from the use of these materials.