SALMAN
AHMAD

The whole thing runs on a Lenovo ThinkCentre that somebody, somewhere, wrote off as e-waste. Bolted to it is an eight-drive RAID-Z2 array — 160 TB raw, about 120 TB usable — which scrubs itself on a schedule, quietly heals its own bit rot, and ships a copy to Backblaze so the library survives my house doing something dramatic. Three copies, two media, one offsite. Not bad for an office desktop nobody wanted.

On top of it sit 25 Docker containers across 10 applications: Plex and Immich for media, Recyclarr and Maintainerr tidying up after me, Traccar swallowing GPS telemetry for reasons that were extremely compelling at the time. All of it reachable over a Tailscale WireGuard mesh and none of it exposed to the internet — zero open ports, the only security posture I actually trust. Portainer runs the stack, Scrutiny watches the disks for early signs of betrayal, and Dozzle streams the logs I fully intend to read one day.

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.