Ask Zico: Production Architecture And Request Flow
4 min readAI Engineering
A system map of Ask Zico: the PHP trust boundary, Cloudflare Worker, evidence stores, model providers, operational state, and end-to-end request lifecycle.
EMAD ASHRAF · ENGINEERING PORTFOLIO
Full-Stack & AI Engineer | Technical Leader | Web Applications
I am a staff-level software engineer focused on delivering user-centric applications from concept to deployment. I specialize in bridging engineering, product, and business needs to craft impactful solutions.
Selected projects
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Ask Zico
A launched source-grounded Arabic assistant built around controlled retrieval, conservative answers, and evidence-first UX.
RAGAI EvaluationTypeScriptCloudflare WorkersVectorize
Madraset El Shamamsa
A long-running Coptic education platform whose PHP architecture, delivery pipeline, and modernization work support a large multilingual content library.
PHPJavaScriptMySQLViteDockerCloudflare
Engineering notes
All articles →Design Alternatives: Why Ask Zico Uses Controlled Retrieval
6 min readAI Engineering
The project-specific evidence behind Ask Zico's controlled retrieval, stable identity, internal semantic routing, and application-owned ranking.
Ingestion Pipeline: Turning Arabic Site Content Into Citation-Ready RAG Chunks
8 min readAI Engineering
How Ask Zico preserves readable Arabic, normalized search text, deterministic per-build IDs, metadata, and coordinated retrieval artifacts.
Retrieval Pipeline: Hybrid Arabic Search With Stable Citations
6 min readAI Engineering
The launched Ask Zico retrieval pipeline: Arabic normalization, semantic routing, Vectorize, lexical shards, filters, rank fusion, and KV hydration.