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
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
The Home Server Where a Nix Migration Broke Two Jobs Silently
Launchd jobs silently failed after migration. See how an explicit nix-darwin launchd PATH restored backups and exposed hidden dependencies.
11 min
Moving My Mac from Chezmoi to Nix Without Losing the Parts That Write Back
A chezmoi to Nix migration can break PATH precedence, writable configs, and rollback assumptions. Here’s how I moved my macOS dotfiles safely.
12 min
Building a Documentation Skill That Tests Whether Code and Docs Stay Coupled
Documentation drift lets code outrun its explanation. Catch it with a pull-request check that compares governed changes with relevant documentation.
10 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 September 7, 2026
↳Elsewhere
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