Hanzala Afzal

Werkstudent Software Engineer · ProtocolHero

Köln, Germany · Hybrid

B2B SaaS for inspection protocols, used by almost 200 paying craft businesses

• Built GitHub Actions pipelines that lint, test and deploy over SSH to a DigitalOcean droplet.
• Ran staging and production behind Cloudflare and Nginx, including DNS, SSL and R2 storage.
• Monitored server load, Horizon queues on Redis and error rates with Sentry and Laravel Nightwatch.
• Owned the AI assistant, connecting Gemini to the app through Laravel MCP with timeouts, retries and guardrails.

• Laravel
• Redis
• Laravel Horizon
• Nginx
• Cloudflare
• DigitalOcean
• GitHub Actions
• Docker
• Sentry
• Gemini API
• Laravel MCP
• React

Werkstudent Web and Backend Developer · Sunbonoo · Activity Internet GmbH

Munich, Germany · Remote

Booking platform for activities and trips, built on Magento 1.9 and OpenMage

• Upgraded the live shop from PHP 7.2 to 8.1 on OpenMage, testing every module on staging first.
• Profiled slow MySQL queries and added column indexes to speed up catalog pages.
• Connected the DeepL API to translate thousands of pages into more than 10 languages, with a hash cache.
• Integrated Stripe and PayPal into the admin panel so payment links are generated automatically.

• PHP
• Magento 1.9
• OpenMage
• MySQL
• DeepL
• Stripe
• PayPal
• PHPUnit

Web Developer · Techo Studios

Islamabad, Pakistan · Onsite

• Built REST APIs and MySQL schemas for a real estate ERP covering search filters, billing and PDF documents.
• Deployed client Laravel apps to Linux servers, setting up web servers, databases, domains and SSL.

• PHP
• Laravel
• MySQL
• REST APIs
• Linux

Laravel Dynamic Throttle

A Laravel package on Packagist for changing API rate limits while the app runs.

• Rules live in the database and compile into the cache, so new limits apply within seconds without a deploy.
• Ships with a dry run mode, exemptions and a dashboard, built test first with CI on GitHub Actions.

• PHP
• Laravel
• Redis
• PHPUnit
• GitHub Actions

Retentioneering Tools

An open source product analytics library in Python.

• Three merged performance fixes for DuckDB query reuse, large event filters and transition graphs.
• Repeated DuckDB queries ran about 1.9 to 4.6 times faster in benchmarks.
• Generated SQL shrank from about 8 MB to 170 characters.

• Python
• DuckDB
• SQL
• Performance

Custom MVC Blog: PHP Without a Framework

A small PHP application, written to work directly with what Laravel usually handles.

• Wrote routing, authentication, CRUD and permissions by hand.
• Separate controllers, services and models, with CSRF protection, PHPUnit tests and PSR-12 checks.

• PHP
• FastRoute
• PHPUnit
• PSR-12

Agentic CSV Analyst

A chat app for analysing CSV files.

• The LLM plans and explains, while DuckDB runs the calculations.
• RAG on Qdrant, persistent conversations and isolated data per user.

• Next.js
• TypeScript
• LangGraph
• DuckDB
• Qdrant
• OpenAI API