DEV Community: Ikrame Ibn Hayoun

An introverted dev in an extroverted world

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:02:12 +0000

"Explain it to me in dev terms."

My social battery has a rate limit.

The world isn't made for introverts: it's configured with extrovert defaults. I realized that as a teenager, and it completely changed the way I saw everything and interacted with people.

As strange as it sounds, realizing it made me more awkward, not less. Before, I simply talked, stayed quiet, left when I got tired. Then I started analyzing myself in every conversation, and analyzing everyone else too. Maybe that's where my overthinker side began: the constant monitoring consumes more resources than the interaction itself.

Being aware that I'm an introvert has also helped me manage myself much better: I know my rate limit, I know I recharge alone, and I no longer see it as a bug. I came without documentation, so writing my own manual has taken me years.

Every time I walk out my front door, I carry the reminder with me: this world was built for a group of people that I don't belong to.

But wait, this isn't sad or a bad thing. Keep reading, will you?

Even my interactions on social media feel more controlled. Social media is literally the place where you can be the freest version of yourself, and yet I still don't really post, speak up, or join in that much. I behave almost exactly as I do in real life.

And you might be wondering: what does any of this have to do with being a developer? The truth is, the point I wanted to get to is networking. Especially in tech, I keep coming across people who are incredibly talented and just genuinely cool and kind. But I never get much further than the impulse to reply to one of their tweets or add a comment, let alone talk to them directly. And don't even get me started on events like hackathons.

And honestly, I'm not shy. In fact, once I feel comfortable, I might just yappear non-stop about the interests i'm disgustingly well versed in

Don't get me wrong: this isn't a complaint, and I'm not saying I'm uncomfortable being an introvert. Quite the opposite. I've always been someone who prefers to listen and observe, and not step in more than necessary. But I don't know, sometimes introverts get these sudden urges too. Sometimes we want a little while to role-play as extroverts.

I don't know whether finding out was a gift or a burden; I suppose that, like almost everything, it was both at once.

If your config is the same, you already know what I mean.

And now there's a question I would like to throw at you: is there any introvert or extrovert quality you don't have that you wish you did? Which one? Why?

[Boost]

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:36:42 +0000

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun

Sep 10

Translating vs Localizing: what LLM agents get wrong about Spanish (and how I fixed it with a skill)

#showdev #i18n #webdev #ai

3 min read

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Ikrame Ibn Hayoun — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 11:38:19 +0000

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun

Sep 10

Translating vs Localizing: what LLM agents get wrong about Spanish (and how I fixed it with a skill)

#showdev #i18n #webdev #ai

3 min read

[Boost]

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:06:00 +0000

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun

Sep 10

Translating vs Localizing: what LLM agents get wrong about Spanish (and how I fixed it with a skill)

#showdev #i18n #webdev #ai

3 min read

[Boost]

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 10:33:05 +0000

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun

Sep 10

Translating vs Localizing: what LLM agents get wrong about Spanish (and how I fixed it with a skill)

#showdev #i18n #webdev #ai

3 min read

[Boost]

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:20:00 +0000

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun

Sep 10

Translating vs Localizing: what LLM agents get wrong about Spanish (and how I fixed it with a skill)

#showdev #i18n #webdev #ai

3 min read

[Boost]

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:35:23 +0000

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun

Sep 10

Translating vs Localizing: what LLM agents get wrong about Spanish (and how I fixed it with a skill)

#showdev #i18n #webdev #ai

3 min read

Translating vs Localizing: what LLM agents get wrong about Spanish (and how I fixed it with a skill)

Ikrame Ibn Hayoun — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:27:58 +0000

I'm a native Spanish speaker who builds websites in English first and localizes them into Spanish later. And here's the thing most people miss: Spanish is not one language, and English isn't either.

Some real examples of what "translating" gets wrong:

The plural you

In Spain, informal plural is vosotros. In Latin America it simply doesn't exist - they use ustedes instead. An agent that mixes both in the same interface instantly reads as machine-translated to millions of native speakers.

The vocabulary minefield

In Spain you use an ordenador and a móvil. In Latin America it's a computadora and a celular. Neither is wrong - but picking the wrong one for your market makes your product feel foreign.

English has the same problem

colour vs color is the obvious one, but it goes deeper: in British English licence is the noun and license is the verb; American English uses license for both. A Brit writes a CV and lives in a flat on the ground floor; an American writes a resume and lives in an apartment on the first floor - which is a different floor entirely.

Dates silently lie

04/05/2026 is April 5th in the US and May 4th almost everywhere else. All-numeric dates are a bug factory when content crosses markets.

The "aterrizar" incident

A website for foreigners moving to Málaga got "landing in Málaga" translated as "aterrizando en Málaga". And here's the thing: it's not exactly wrong - "aterrizar" does mean "to land". The problem is that no Spaniard would ever say it like that. Someone from Spain would say "mudarse a Málaga" or "trasladarse a Málaga", because that's how people actually talk about moving to a city. "Aterrizar" is what planes do 🛬.

That's the gap in a nutshell: the model produced a dictionary-correct translation that sounds robotic to every native speaker it was meant for. It had full context and still went word-by-word.

Why does this happen to AI agents?

Because translation is a word-level task and localization is a context-level one. Agents default to the statistical center of "Spanish", which is really a blend of twenty countries. They merge conventions from different locales, translate placeholders and ICU messages that should stay untouched, and guess when they should ask.

So I built an agent skill that forces the right behavior:

A dedicated reference guide per locale (en-GB, en-US, es-ES, es-419). Never borrow conventions from a neighboring locale - that's exactly how the vosotros/ustedes mixing happens.
Context before words: the agent reads the page, the component and the user journey before resolving anything ambiguous. That's how "landing" becomes "tu nueva vida" instead of "aterrizando".
Structural safety: keys, placeholders, ICU messages, HTML tags and links stay untranslated. A Python guard diffs JSON catalogs and catches missing keys, type drift, broken placeholders and mojibake:

python scripts/locale_guard.py en.json es.json

npx skills add ikrame-ih/english-spanish-web-localization

ikrame-ih / english-spanish-web-localization

Context-aware EN↔ES web localization (en-GB/en-US/es-ES/es-419). Offline locale_guard; benchmarks pending.

English–Spanish Web Localization

English · Español

English

A reusable agent skill for context-aware, bidirectional localization of websites and digital products across four deliberately separate locales:

Locale	Target variety
`en-GB`	British English
`en-US`	US English
`es-ES`	Spanish for Spain
`es-419`	Broad Latin American Spanish

Offline package checks pass (VALIDATION.md). Instant mini-proof: benchmarks/results/instant-mini-2026-09-10/. I checked these myself; the full 30-case blind review is still ahead. Portfolio and external paired scores are still pending. Not for certified/sworn, legal, medical, or financial translation. Does not promise universal ATS compatibility.

This is not a word-replacement prompt. It treats copy as part of a product journey and evaluates meaning, audience, market, interface function, terminology, accessibility, SEO, layout constraints, and technical integrity before selecting a target formulation.

It also applies that standard outside a webpage: portfolios, CVs, Markdown, documentation, emails, forms, CMS exports, and locale catalogues. The format changes the checks, not the required…

View on GitHub

Built for my own workflow, published in case it saves someone else a few "aterrizar" moments. What's the funniest literal translation you've caught an LLM producing?