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.
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Building the Kindle I Wanted
3 parts
Jailbreaking a Paperwhite, extending KOReader, and connecting it to a private reading stack.
Production Observability at System Boundaries
7 parts
Field notes on proving telemetry across proxies, runtimes, queues, edge controls, and production logs without confusing configuration with evidence.
Mobile Release Engineering
6 parts
Field-tested release engineering across iOS, Android, and macOS: promotion gates, build economics, signing custody, immutable artifacts, and user-installable proof.
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Latest
When a Product Brief Wants a New Service Before the System Map Exists
How to assess microservice boundaries when a product brief proposes a new service before ownership, data authority, and dependencies are mapped.
When an 8 GB pnpm Cache Cost Minutes to Save Seconds
A pnpm CI cache grew to 8 GB, saved seconds, and broke builds. Here is how measurement justified removing it and bounding Gradle cache growth.
I Spent an Hour Proving the TLS Was Fine
Debug a KOReader Tailscale proxy failure step by step: check DNS and routing, rule out TLS, and add HTTP CONNECT tunnelling to LuaSocket and LuaSec.
The Plugin Only Wrote, It Never Read
How I extended a KOReader bookmark plugin without rebuilding existing work: check remote branches, add search, fix device bugs, and report test scope.
↳NowUpdated August 22, 2026
Currently reading
Live hiring
2 open rolesSynced Aug 22, 2026
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Current focus
Building reliable systems, then writing down what survives contact with production.
We do not make things easy to do. We make them easy to understand.
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