About

Hi, I’m Ilham.

I spend most of my time working on backend systems, databases, servers, and infrastructure.

I’m the kind of person who likes knowing what happens behind the scenes. If something breaks, I usually want to know why it broke, what actually happened underneath, and how to make sure I understand it well enough to fix it again later.

A lot of what I know came from trying things myself.

If I find a tool or technology interesting, I’ll usually install it somewhere, connect it to something, see how it behaves, break a few things along the way, and learn from there. Reading documentation helps, but I understand things much better once I’ve actually used them.

I also like following a system from end to end.

That might start with an API, continue through a database, container, reverse proxy, network, storage, and eventually the server it runs on. When something goes wrong, I’d rather understand the whole path than think of each layer as someone else’s problem.

How I work

I like simple setups.

Not necessarily the smallest setup possible, but something I can still understand, troubleshoot, and maintain months later.

I enjoy trying new tools, but I don’t really care about using technology just because it’s new or popular. Usually I want to know whether it actually makes something simpler, faster, cheaper, safer, or easier to operate.

Sometimes the answer is a new tool.

Sometimes it’s just a shell script and a cron job.

Both are fine.

I also tend to care a lot about the boring parts of running software: backups, monitoring, logs, replication, storage, migrations, resource usage, and what happens when something eventually fails.

Building something is only one part of the job. Keeping it running is usually where things get interesting.

Things I’m interested in

Most of my technical work revolves around backend development, Linux, databases, containers, networking, infrastructure, automation, and production systems.

I especially enjoy problems that sit somewhere between software and infrastructure — where application code eventually turns into database queries, network traffic, CPU usage, storage, latency, and infrastructure costs.

My curiosity tends to wander outside software too.

I spend a surprising amount of time learning about personal finance, investing, interest rates, and how different financial products work.

I think I just like understanding systems, whatever form they take.

This site

ilham.dev is mostly a place for me to write things down.

Problems I’ve run into, things I’ve tried, notes I might need again someday, and whatever I happen to be learning at the time.

Some of it might be useful to someone else.

Most of it is probably here so future me doesn’t have to figure out the same thing twice.