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 →
Building Press
6 parts
How I built Press, the editorial engine that writes from my work. One boundary of the system per part.
A spare MacBook as a home server
6 parts
How I turned a spare MacBook into the most useful infrastructure I own: how I reach it with no public address, the background jobs that run my week, the media stack and what I deleted, one dashboard that makes it usable, and the local model, monitoring, and backups that let me trust it.
Building a school-assignment assistant for my daughter
6 parts
Building a private school-assignment assistant for one child: scraping a portal with no API, an LLM that learns to discard, cached summaries, a small agent, and knowing what it costs.
↳WritingAll →
Latest
Trusting a home server: a local model, monitoring, and backups
How I set up home server monitoring with Gatus, Uptime Kuma, and Beszel, ran a local LLM for private data, and built nightly rsync backups I actually test.
Jun 2026 · 16 min
Making a home server usable with one dashboard
How a self-hosted dashboard called Glance turned a pile of containers into something a whole household uses from a single browser tab.
Building a self-hosted media stack (and what I deleted)
Running a self-hosted media stack is more integration work than install. Here is how I wired Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr and friends, and what I deleted.
Running background jobs on macOS with launchd
How to run launchd scheduled jobs on macOS: plist patterns, Full Disk Access pitfalls, and the C launcher trick that survives every redeploy.
↳NowUpdated June 2026
Leading
Engineering at Axelerant, working across the stack, end to end.
Mentoring
Growing engineers into their first lead and manager roles.
↳Elsewhere