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Lead Full-Stack Engineer & Architect | Greek Community of Cairo (EKK) | 2026

//Context & Scale

The Greek Community of Cairo (EKK) is a historic community, cultural, and civic institution founded in Egypt in 1904. Over a decade of institutional announcements, historical publications, and community archives (5,200+ posts and pages) were locked in proprietary page builders (BeTheme Muffin Builder, WPBakery, LayerSlider) and 17 obsolete plugins. The portal suffered from heavy database autoload bloat (~700KB per query), legacy PHP 7.4 runtime constraints, broken caching drop-ins, and slow Time to First Byte (TTFB). Retained as Lead Full-Stack Engineer and Architect to modernize the platform onto PHP 8.2, programmatically transform all content into native Gutenberg blocks without manual content re-entry, eliminate database bloat, integrate Redis object caching, and orchestrate a zero-downtime production cutover.

//Architectural Decisions

  • ->Automated AST Content Transformation Engine: Developed a modular content migration engine using @wordpress/block-serialization-default-parser to parse proprietary Muffin Builder structures, wraps, and nested shortcodes into native core blocks (core/columns, core/heading, core/paragraph, core/image, core/button), converting 4,870 posts and pages with zero AST validation failures.
  • ->Autonomous Dual-Runtime Cutover Pipeline: Engineered a deterministic Bash deployment pipeline (bin/deploy-production.sh) that staged legacy plugin deactivations and theme removals under PHP 7.4 before atomically switching the web server to PHP 8.2 and bootstrapping the modern FSE block theme, preventing runtime parse errors during cutover.
  • ->Database Autoload Remediation: Audited and purged legacy transients and orphaned options tables (rs-templates, redux_builder_amp, revslider-addons), disabling autoload on obsolete rows to significantly lower memory consumption per PHP request.
  • ->In-Memory Redis Object Caching: Integrated Redis Object Cache alongside PHP 8.2 OPcache byte-code optimization, eliminating redundant database queries and driving TTFB below 200ms.

//Engineering Execution

  • ->Bespoke Block Theme Architecture: Built the ekkairo-flagship block theme from scratch utilizing theme.json styling definitions, enforcing clean Greek typography standards (el_GR) and eliminating external page-builder stylesheets.
  • ->Zero-Downtime Media Virtualization: Configured Nginx proxy-pass fallbacks to stream 50GB of production media assets on demand during local and staging development, eliminating massive local disk footprint requirements during migration staging.
  • ->Atomic Rollback Automation: Embedded automated database snapshots, file backup stages, and pre-execution verification gates into the deployment automation scripts to guarantee instantaneous rollbacks in case of unexpected errors.

//Measurable Impact

  • ->4,870 Records Modernized with 0 Data Loss: Successfully converted 4,870 historical posts and pages into native Gutenberg blocks with zero manual content re-entry and zero AST validation errors.
  • ->17 Legacy Plugins Eliminated: Deactivated and eliminated 17 obsolete plugins, removing commercial page builder vendor lock-in.
  • ->Sub-200ms Time to First Byte: Delivered sub-200ms TTFB and substantially reduced PHP request memory footprint with Redis object caching and autoload purging.
  • ->Zero Cutover Downtime: The automated deployment pipeline executed the full production cutover with zero service interruption and zero manual database intervention.