Engineer. Traveller. Perpetual beginner.
A curious mind.
A life in
motion.
I’m Amjad. I build software, take the long way home, and learn things the hands-on way. This is where it all comes together.
Good stories usually start
outside the comfort zone.
- countries
- 14
- km driven
- 6.4k
- steel frame
- 1
- chess titles
- 0
01 / The journal
Life, off script.
Roads worth taking. Things worth making.
Notes from everything in between.
8 stories to get lost in
Newest entries first
UpcomingTwo weeks on the Hà Giang Loop
Limestone karsts, a rented Honda Win, and a hard rule about never riding after dark. Booking the flights this week.
UpcomingChasing light on the Karakoram Highway
Three weeks, one borrowed 4×4, and the highest paved border crossing on earth. Planning notes before I lose signal for a month.
Welding a home: the steel frame, week one
Forty metres of box section, a second-hand MIG welder, and the discovery that my garage floor is nowhere near level.
What forty losing blitz games taught me
I exported every 3+0 game I lost in May and looked for the pattern. There was exactly one, and it was embarrassing.
The one-handed backhand project
Eighteen months rebuilding a shot I could already hit competently, for reasons that are mostly aesthetic.
Kyoto in the off-season
February, no cherry blossom, half the crowds. The best week I have ever spent in Japan and nobody was there to see it.
Solar, lithium, and 400 watts of regret
I sized the trailer's electrical system on a spreadsheet, then found out what a fridge compressor actually does in August.
Annotating my own blunders with a local model
Stockfish tells you the move was bad. I wanted something that could tell me why I played it. Runs entirely on the 4080.
02 / Selected work
Made with intent.
Small obsessions turned into useful things.
From the first sketch to the last commit.
Built to scratch an itch.
Shared in case you have it too.
A camera app that un-mirrors your reflection in real time, so the face you see is the face the room sees.
- Latency
- < 16 ms
- Frame rate
- 60 fps
- Platforms
- iOS · Android
A few good tools.
The machines, models, and everyday tools that make the work possible.
The rig
Built for two things that turn out to want the same hardware: rendering frames fast, and keeping a 30B model resident in VRAM without swapping.
- GPU
- RTX 4080 · 16 GB
- Memory
- 64 GB DDR5
- Storage
- 4 TB NVMe
- Cooling
- 360 mm AIO
Mac Mini
The quiet one. Lives behind the monitor, never sleeps, and handles everything that should not depend on whether the workstation is powered up.
- Role
- Build & home server
- Runs
- CI, backups, media
- Noise
- None, ever
- Draw
- ~7 W idle
Local models
Everything private runs at home. Nothing personal — games, journals, half-written ideas — goes to somebody else's GPU.
- Ollama
- llama.cpp
- LM Studio
- Qwen
- Llama
- Whisper
- GGUF Q5
Agentic workflows
Less autocomplete, more delegation. The pattern that stuck: a planning pass that never touches files, parallel agents doing the mechanical work, and an adversarial review pass whose only job is to try to prove the first two wrong. The review pass is what makes the rest safe to trust.
- Claude Code
- MCP servers
- Custom subagents
- Plan → fan out → verify
- Local eval harness
Desk
Nothing exotic. It just has to disappear while I am using it.
- Display
- 34" ultrawide
- Keys
- Split, tactile
- Audio
- Open-back
- Light
- Bias, warm
Run locally
1.4Mtokens generated on device
Software
Half of this list is for building software and half is for building objects. The overlap is smaller than you would think.
- Neovim
- TypeScript
- Rust
- Figma
- Fusion 360
- Obsidian
- Ghostty