About Salim Haniff

I’ve spent most of my career doing more with less — and open source is the reason that was even possible.

My story starts in early-2000s Toronto, working in radio, media, and television. We were trying to build interactive TV experiences on analogue infrastructure heading toward digital. Proprietary technology kept us boxed in — we had the vision, but the vendor didn’t build the feature, and we didn’t have the budget to wait. So a few of us started pulling apart the problem. We discovered that a WebTV box (which didn’t even officially exist in Canada yet) was just making calls to websites over the cable line. If the endpoint was a website, we could build it ourselves. That was our first Linux-PHP-PostgreSQL stack, and it changed how I saw what was possible.

That pattern repeated everywhere. Streaming media? Proprietary licensing was out of reach, but open source encoding tools let us do MPEG transport streams on commodity hardware. Healthcare IT? We ran a hospital research department’s mail servers on repurposed dustbin PCs because there was no budget for Microsoft Exchange — and reliability went up each time we replaced a proprietary dependency with an open source alternative. Researchers saw stable infrastructure, applied for bigger grants, and came back with real data center budgets. Open source didn’t just level the playing field. It tilted it.

What Guides Me

• Technology is a right, not a privilege. When hospitals, schools, and small organizations can’t afford proprietary licenses, they don’t just lose software — they lose capability. That shouldn’t be the deciding factor.
• Constraints don’t limit innovation — they focus it. Having no budget didn’t stop us. It forced us to find better solutions. The underserved aren’t lacking intelligence or ambition. They’re lacking access. Open source closes that gap.
• The people closest to the problem deserve the best tools. Researchers fighting for grants, community orgs running on donated hardware, underfunded teams doing critical work — they deserve infrastructure that works, not hand-me-downs that crash.

What Drives Me

Democratizing technology so that people and organizations who are less fortunate can compete, contribute, and thrive — on their own terms.

I’ve seen what happens when the underserved get the same tools as everyone else. A hospital research department running on discarded hardware stabilized their servers with open source, and researchers went from reactive firefighting to winning million-dollar grants. Reliability isn’t just a technical achievement — it’s a form of equity. When your server stops crashing, you stop asking permission and start pursuing opportunities.

The cycle of underinvestment is real: bad infrastructure leads to unreliable services, which erodes confidence and funding, which leads to even worse infrastructure. Open source breaks that cycle by providing capable tools at zero licensing cost.

That’s why I’ve always chosen to work for the underdog rather than big tech.

What I’m Working Toward

This site is where I think through technology from that point of view — AI, human-computer interaction, open-source systems, IoT, and the messy reality of turning ideas into tools people can actually use. I’m less interested in hype and more interested in what happens when technology leaves the slide deck, enters the real world, and has to deal with people, constraints, context, and consequences.

Beyond writing, I want to make the practical knowledge I’ve accumulated accessible to the people who need it most — the teams without budget, the orgs without dedicated IT, the people told they can’t afford to be reliable. Whether that’s through breakdowns of how I built things on discarded hardware, patterns for making open source infrastructure work at scale, or simply asking whether the thing we’re building should exist in the first place.

Not every idea needs to become a startup pitch. Sometimes the useful work is asking the harder question.