SALMAN
AHMAD

The whole thing runs on a Lenovo ThinkCentre that somebody, somewhere, wrote off as e-waste. The drives don't fit in it — eight 20 TB disks live in a JBOD I fabricated out of steel at my last job, wired back to the host through an LSI SAS HBA in IT mode so that ZFS owns the disks directly instead of a RAID controller pretending to. Dual parity, about 109 TiB usable, currently 76% full. A full scrub takes just under two days and has never found anything it couldn't repair.

On top of it sit 38 containers. Jellyfin and Immich for media and photos, the usual *arr stack tidying up after me, Traccar swallowing GPS telemetry for reasons that were extremely compelling at the time. The admin surfaces — TrueNAS, SSH, Portainer, logs — are reachable only across a Tailscale WireGuard mesh. A short list of things my family actually use is published through a Cloudflare Tunnel. Either way there is not one inbound port open on the router, which is the only network posture I actually trust.

Backups are the part I'd fix first. Photos and configs go to encrypted cloud storage once a week, so my worst case is losing seven days of pictures. The media library isn't backed up at all — it's the one thing I can rebuild, so it's the one thing I let go. There's no UPS yet either, and the JBOD has to be powered up before the host or the array simply isn't there when it boots. None of that is an accident; I just know exactly what it costs me.

Formally: storage architecture, capacity planning, container orchestration, secure networking and observability, end to end, owned by one person. Informally: a deeply over-engineered guarantee that nobody in my family ever loses a photo.

I like games that punish hesitation — Apex especially, where the fight is usually decided in the second before it actually starts.

Somewhere along the way playing turned into building. I run the website and the support bot for a DayZ community, which means I now spend considerably more time reading server logs and error codes than I do surviving anything. I'm not sure that counts as a hobby any more, but I'm also not stopping.

General relativity is the closest thing I have to a hobby that produces absolutely nothing. I read about it constantly and build with it never.

With one exception. I once spent a weekend trying to render a black hole for the top of this website — integrating null geodesics per pixel so the far side of the accretion disk would lens up over the event horizon the way the real thing does. It never shipped. It was the most fun I've had writing code I deleted.

Where I go when I've been staring at a terminal too long. I'm there for the art direction and the structure more than the plot — the medium gets away with visual choices live action can't afford, and the best of it commits to a single idea harder than most films are willing to.

It's also the only thing on this list I don't try to optimise, measure or automate, which is probably why it works as a reset.