Bassam Ismail

Bassam Ismail

Engineering leader. Lifelong tinkerer. Occasional writer.

I lead engineering teams and shape technical direction. I started hands-on and never fully put it down. I still build small tools and run a few services of my own. I write here about the work, the decisions, and the people behind both.

↳SeriesAll →
Three Machines, One Flake
3 parts
A migration from chezmoi to Nix across a laptop and home server—and the public VPS that proved the right answer is sometimes not Nix.
Building dam.rs
6 parts
Technical field notes from building dam.rs: storage economics, searchable archives, tenant-safe delivery, customer-owned infrastructure, integrity scrubbing, and accessible browsing at scale.
Building the Kindle I Wanted
3 parts
Jailbreaking a Paperwhite, extending KOReader, and connecting it to a private reading stack.
↳WritingAll →
Latest
Adding DMS Change Capture Without Letting an Abandoned Slot Fill the Source Database
PostgreSQL WAL growing during DMS change capture? Limit slot retention, verify runtime settings, and trace a committed change into S3.
8 min
Why Downloading a Protected File in an iOS PWA Required the Native Share Sheet
Stuck viewing a file instead of saving it? Fix an iOS PWA file download by preparing the protected File and opening the native share sheet.
11 min
When Database Sanitization Locked Real Users Out of Acceptance Testing
Drupal database sanitization locked out real testers. Preserve approved identities while controlling credentials, email, and access in lower environments.
8 min
The Ubuntu Server That Did Not Need Nix
Planning to migrate Ubuntu to NixOS? See why rebooting, closing network exposure, bounding logs, and recovering config mattered more.
12 min

Notes from Skippednote

New posts, occasionally.

Essays and field notes about engineering leadership, infrastructure, software, books, and the systems I build for myself.

No fixed schedule. Confirm by email, then hear from me only when there is something worth publishing.

↳NowUpdated October 10, 2026
↳Elsewhere
github.com/skippednotelinkedin.com/in/skippednotex.com/skippednotegoodreads.com/skippednote[email protected]