About this site

Bug Brewery is where I write things down.

I'm Talha, a backend and cloud engineer. Three years of fintech at Bank Al Habib in Karachi, building Java and Spring Boot microservices talking over Kafka, with PostgreSQL, Redis, and GCP filling in the rest. Currently in Budapest doing an MSc in Computer Science at ELTE on the Autonomous Systems track.

What's here

Deployment guides, postmortems of things I broke, and notes on tools I'm evaluating.

Most of it comes out of the infrastructure I run on a single Oracle Cloud ARM box. I self-host it mainly to find out what fails when nobody is paid to keep it running. The answer is usually networking, and usually at an inconvenient hour. There's also local LLM inference on a secondhand workstation, which turns out to be an efficient way to develop strong opinions about VRAM.

Everything here is free and stays that way. No subscription, no gate, no algorithm deciding whether you see it.

Why brewery

Because it's the same loop either way. Follow the process, wait, find out what went wrong, adjust one variable, run it again. Nobody gets it right the first time and everybody pretends they did.

Why write it down

The interesting part of engineering is rarely the interesting part. It's the config flag nobody documented, the permission bit on a bind mount, the certificate that never got issued because two settings quietly contradicted each other.

That's where the hours actually go, and it's almost never what gets written up. So this is the version I wanted to find at 2am and didn't.

Open source

I also send patches to projects I actually use, when I can prove the fix rather than guess at it. Merged into nanocoder, open against Apache DataFusion Ballista and the Hedera Java SDK. Same rule as everything else here: read the actual code before touching it, and say what you verified, not what you assume.

Get in touch

If something here saved you an afternoon, or if I got something wrong, I want to hear about it. I'm on GitHub and LinkedIn or say Hi to me on:
[email protected]