About

Hi, I’m Shadi.

I build infrastructure for a living. Most of my days are spent working on systems that need to be reliable, predictable, and easy for other engineers to use. I care a lot about how things behave in production, how we release changes safely, and how systems scale over time.

Infrastructure, to me, should not feel mysterious. It should be clear. You should understand what it does and why it behaves the way it does. If something feels too clever, it usually means it will be painful later.

I care deeply about reliability. If a solution looks great but makes the system more fragile, it is not a good solution. Reliability is not something you add at the end. It has to be part of the design from the beginning.

I also think simplicity matters more than we admit. Complex systems are harder to debug, harder to scale, and harder to change. Simple systems are easier to live with. They age better. They are kinder to the future version of you and to the people who have to operate them.

I did not always think this way.

Earlier in my career, I was mostly focused on getting things to work. I did not think deeply about safe rollouts, SLOs, or what would happen months later when traffic doubled. Over time, I was lucky to work with thoughtful infrastructure and SRE engineers who reshaped how I see systems. Being around people who take reliability seriously changes you. It makes you slower in good ways. More deliberate. More aware of tradeoffs.

I am still learning.

Outside of infrastructure, I run.

Running is my favorite feedback loop. You either did the work or you did not. The miles do not care about intentions. If I train consistently, I get stronger. If I skip the work, I feel it quickly. I like that honesty.

I am chasing a sub-3 hour marathon. I have been training seriously for more than two years now. It is hard, frustrating, addictive, and strangely calming at the same time. It also conveniently justifies eating everything I love, which I consider an important performance benefit.

This blog is just me thinking out loud.

It is not the polished LinkedIn version of me. It is not carefully curated. It is where I write about infrastructure, running logs, random thoughts, lessons learned the hard way, travel, life updates, and sometimes things I probably should have kept to myself.

If you know someone who tends to overshare ideas and think in long paragraphs, you already understand what this is.

Welcome.