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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A Home for AI Artifacts
3 parts
The internal platform where the team publishes AI-generated artifacts to durable, authenticated URLs instead of external services: what it does, how it's built on one small box, and the serverless start we walked back.
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
Submitting Timesheets from Slack Without Writing Too Early
Slack timesheet submission can trigger approvals too early. Use preview, re-read, confirmation, and status checks before writing.
Walking Back from Serverless
Serverless to a single Go binary fixed upload caps, cold starts, and streaming friction in an artifact host without moving DynamoDB or S3.
One Binary, One Box
Single Go binary setup for one small EC2 box: host routing, OAuth cookies, on-demand TLS, and deploys by copy and restart.
A Home for AI Artifacts: The Platform We Built So Nothing Leaves the Company
AI-generated artifacts need durable, authenticated URLs. Here is how an internal platform turns assistant output into links that do not expire.
↳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