gittiltesting
Git Bisect: Finding the Commit That Broke Everything
A regression was three weeks old. Manual inspection would take hours. Git bisect found the culprit in 5 minutes and 7 binary searches.
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Welcome to my personal corner of the internet. I’m a software engineer who enjoys digging into how things work — from the inner workings of databases to the nuances of distributed consensus.
Here you’ll find deep dives into the systems I build and maintain, lessons from production incidents, and notes on books that shaped my thinking.
Feel free to explore the blog, browse by tags, or learn more about me.
Latest post
Ht
hello-testinghellotesting
Heyho testing from the admin pages
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Recent writing
careerreflectionmeta
The Art of Saying No to Features (Without Burning Bridges)
Every 'yes' is a 'no' to something else. Learning to decline feature requests constructively was the most valuable skill I developed this year.
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astrojavascriptperformance
Adding View Transitions to a Static Astro Site
View Transitions turned our multi-page site into a single-page-app feel without any framework. Here's the minimal setup.
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metagoreflection
Writing Error Messages That Actually Help Debugging
A good error message tells you what failed, why it failed, and what to do about it. Most error messages I see only do the first.
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pythonrustperformance
Calling Rust from Python: A Practical FFI Walkthrough
We replaced a 200-line Python hot loop with 50 lines of Rust and got a 40x speedup. Here's the exact FFI setup.
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personalgetting-started
Hello World
My first blog post. Excited to start sharing my thoughts!
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Kind words
“Iqbal has a rare ability to see the whole system — not just the code he's writing, but how it fits into everything around it. When our payment pipeline started dropping transactions under load, he traced it to a race condition nobody else could find.”
SC
Sarah Chen
Engineering Manager
Managed Iqbal directly
“Working with Iqbal changed how I think about reliability. He doesn't just build things that work — he builds things that keep working at 3 AM when nobody's watching. His writing on distributed systems is the best I've found.”
RP
Rizky Pratama
Senior Backend Engineer
Collaborated on payment infrastructure
“Iqbal writes about complex systems with a clarity that's hard to find. His posts on database internals helped our entire team level up. He's the engineer you want on your side when things go wrong.”
AP
Anya Petrov
Staff Engineer, Platform Team
Reads the blog, occasional collaborator