Adeel Ahmad
Adeel Ahmad

Adeel Ahmad

I'm a software engineer in Melbourne. This page is for people who have my CV and want to understand how the different parts of it connect.

Most of it comes from one habit: when something I depend on doesn’t make sense to me, I go and learn the layer underneath it.

How it fits together

The short version, oldest first. Each part links to the dated entries behind it.

01
Grade 8 to 2006, Lahore

Starting with security

I started poking at networks in grade 8. In 2006, still at school, I did my first formal vulnerability assessment, on a company's website, and had to explain what I found to the people who ran it.

Network security · Security testing · Vulnerability assessment  ·  2 dated entries →

02
2007 to 2012

Small companies, every job

I studied computer science while working on .NET and PHP projects. The companies were small, so the developer also looked after servers, the network and the phone system. That is where VMware, Asterisk and Cisco came in.

C# · .NET · PHP · VMware · Asterisk · Cisco  ·  7 dated entries →

03
2013 to 2022

Running a consultancy

I ran Xoho Tech for nine years and it grew to about 40 people. It stayed small enough that I kept writing code. Power cuts kept wiping out developers' work, so I moved our development into the browser. That led to containers, a home lab to understand virtualisation and storage, and later Firecracker microVMs. Our archive and media projects needed search, OCR and speech recognition, which was my first contact with machine learning.

A planning workshop: people at long tables facing a wall of flip-chart sheets covered in sticky notes labelled with audiovisual analysis tasks such as speaker identification and silence detection
September 2017. A planning workshop for an open audiovisual metadata platform for libraries and archives.

AWS · Firecracker · Proxmox · Ceph · Remote development · Technical leadership  ·  19 dated entries →

04
2021 to 2023

Moving to cloud, starting with AI

I started experimenting with OpenAI's API in 2021. In 2022 I moved to Melbourne to work as an AWS consultant. In 2023 I sketched how an AI could prepare a plan and first changes before a developer picks up a task, built a small AutoGen prototype, and tried running small models on my own hardware.

OpenAI API · AutoGen · Local models · AWS · Developer workflow  ·  9 dated entries →

05
2024

Sensitive data

I kept experimenting with fine-tuning and small models at home, and gave a public talk on building a personal "second brain" on AWS serverless, using small models for the cheap steps and a large one only when needed. At work I became tech lead on a clinical AI product, where every statement in a generated note had to point back to the conversation it came from.

RAG · Fine-tuning · Synthetic data · Cedar · LLM evaluation · Clinical AI  ·  9 dated entries →

06
2025 to 2026

AI at a bank, models at home

At Commonwealth Bank I work on AI applications from early design to production, mostly on identity, access and security. At home I train small models on a Mac to understand how they learn to reason, and build tools to see what fine-tuning changes inside them.

Identity · AI security · MLX · GRPO · LoRA · Model inspection  ·  12 dated entries →

07
2026

Tools for my own work

Using AI agents every day raised questions I wanted to answer by building: how to write down what an agent is allowed to do, how to stop it calling work done before tests pass, and how to carry decisions from one session to the next. Alongside that I still do storage and networking work, including a fix that was merged into an OpenWrt package.

Go · OCI · Policy-as-code · Agents · Storage · OpenWrt  ·  8 dated entries →

Timeline

What I worked on and when, with the skills each piece involved. Everything is readable below; with JavaScript on, you can search and filter.

Jump toFoundations 22007–2012 72013–2022 192021–2022 62023 262024 182025 92026 · January–June 122026 · July–October 27Cross-period 5

Foundations2 entries

2007–20127 entries

2013–202219 entries

December 2017
Proposed

Planning an open platform for audiovisual metadata

I was on the core team planning an open platform that uses speech recognition, OCR and other machine learning to describe large audiovisual archives. In September 2017 we spent three days on requirements, comparing candidate tools for each part of the pipeline and sketching workflows. The plan was presented at the AMIA conference that December.

Audiovisual archives, Metadata, Speech recognition, OCR, Machine learning, Workflow design

Notes & links
Workshop notes, September 2017, and public project documentation. Project documentation ↗ · 2018 report ↗ · Link to this entry

2021–20226 entries

4 June 2021
Access

Access to OpenAI's API beta

Got access to OpenAI's private API beta while running the consultancy, and started experimenting with it.

Generative AI, LLM APIs

Notes & links
From my own records. This is the date access was granted. Link to this entry

202326 entries

202418 entries

March 2024
Teaching

Public talk: a generative AI second brain on AWS serverless

Gave a talk at a Serverless Melbourne meetup on building a personal "second brain" on AWS serverless while keeping the cost low. Most of it does not need a large model or real-time answers, so documents are stored in S3, organised with small keyword and topic models, and searched with a vector database that sits on S3. Small quantized models handle the cheap steps, and retrieval with a larger model runs only for content I pick.

AWS Lambda, Step Functions, Amazon S3, LanceDB, RAG, Quantized models, Knowledge management, Cost-aware architecture

Notes & links
Public recording and my slides. Talk recording ↗ · Link to this entry

20259 entries

2026 · January–June12 entries

2026 · July–October27 entries

Cross-period5 entries

Skills

Pick a skill to see the entries where it came up. The number is how many entries mention it; it is not a rating.

AWS 8Python 8AI security 7Go 6Model evaluation 6Technical leadership 6Fine-tuning 5RAG 5Solution architecture 5Agent workflows 4Applied AI 4Browser extensions 4Developer tools 4Local inference 4LoRA 4MLX 4OCR 4Security architecture 4Software engineering 4Architecture 3Automation 3GRPO 3Human-in-the-loop design 3Network security 3OCI 3OpenWrt 3PHP 3Privacy 3Protocol analysis 3Proxmox 3React 3Search 3SFT 3Small models 3TDD 3Technical teaching 3Virtualization 3WebRTC 3

369 more, mentioned once or twice

.NET 13CX 1Access-aware retrieval 1Activation analysis 2Adaptive security 1ADB 1Agent architecture 1Agent authorization 1Agent engineering 1Agent evaluation 1Agent handoff 1Agent isolation 1Agent loops 1Agent observability 1Agent security 1Agent tools 2AgentRC 1Agents 1AI architecture 2AI red teaming 1AI-assisted SDLC 2Amazon Bedrock 1Amazon Q Business 1Amazon S3 1Android administration 1API architecture 2API catalogs 1API compatibility 1API integration 2AppleScript 1Application engineering 1Application security 2Architecture trade-offs 1Archival systems 2AST-aware context 1Asterisk 2Async orchestration 1Attention 1Audio 1Audio AI 1Audio processing 1Audio workflows 1Audiovisual archives 1AutoGen 2AWS Lambda 2AWS Nitro 1Backstage 1Backup and restore 1Bandwidth analysis 1Bash 1Brand systems 1Bridging 1Browser IDEs 1Browser tools 1BuildKit 1C 1C# 1Caching 1Cedar 2Ceph 1Change management 1CI/CD 1Cisco 2Claude Code hooks 1CLI/TUI 1Client communication 1Clinical AI 1Cloud architecture 1Cloud consulting 1Cloudflare 1Computer science 1Computer vision 2Computer-use automation 1Consulting 2Container architecture 1Containers 1Content transformation 1Content-addressed storage 1Context handoff 1Conversation export 1Cost-aware architecture 1Cross-model evaluation 1Cross-platform interfaces 1Cybersecurity 1Data engineering 1Data export 1Data ingestion 1Data integration 1Data locality 1Data modeling 1Data pipelines 1Data platforms 1Data preservation 1Data provenance 1Data quality 1Dataset engineering 2dbt 1DeepSpeech 1Defensive tool design 1Delivery management 2Dependency management 2Dependency supply chain 1Dev containers 1Developer enablement 1Developer environments 1Developer experience 2Developer onboarding 2DevOps 2DevSecOps 1Distributed storage 1Dockerfiles 1Document processing 1Domain-driven design 1E-commerce 1E-signature workflows 1ECS 1Edge AI 1EKS 1Emby 1Encryption 1Engineering leadership 2Engineering metrics 1Engineering standards 2Enterprise integration 2Enterprise search 1Entrepreneurship 2Environment templates 1Environment-as-code 1Ephemeral workspaces 1Evidence modeling 1Execution-boundary analysis 1Experiment design 1Experiment tracking 1Expert scaffolding 1fastText 1Feasibility analysis 1Fibre networking 1File integrity 1Filesystem adapters 1Filesystem-native tools 1Filesystems 2Firecracker 1FreePBX 1FUSE 1GenAI security 1Generative AI 1GitLab CI/CD 1Gitpod 1Governance 1GPT-NeoX 1GPU inference 1Gradio 1Griptape 1GSM/SMS 1Hardware control 1Hardware diagnostics 1High availability 1Honeypots 1HTTP analysis 1Hybrid search 1IAM 1IDE extensibility 1IDE integration 1Image customization 1IndexedDB 1Inference economics 1Integration testing 1Interface design 1Internal developer platforms 1IPsec 1iSCSI 1Isolation design 1Java 1JavaScript 1Jira integration 1JSONL 1Kaldi 1Knowledge distillation 1Knowledge graphs 2Knowledge management 2Kubernetes 1KVM 1LanceDB 1libkrun 1Licensing awareness 1Lifecycle automation 1Linux 1Linux containers 1Linux gadget interfaces 1Linux networking 1llama.cpp 1LLM APIs 1LLM evaluation 1LLM-as-Judge 1Local AI 1Logit lens 1macFUSE 1Machine learning 2macOS Accessibility 1MCP 2Mechanistic interpretability 2Media integration 2Media pipelines 2Media platforms 1Mentoring 1Metadata 1Metadata modeling 1MFA 1MicroVMs 2MikroTik 1MLOps 1Model comparison 1Multi-agent architecture 1Multi-agent orchestration 2Multimodal evaluation 1MySQL 1NER 1Network diagnostics 1Networking 1nftables 1Node.js 1NVIDIA 1OAuth2 2Observability 1OIDC 1Onboarding 1ONNX 1Open LLMs 1Open vSwitch 1Open-source collaboration 1Operational resilience 1Opus 1OSPF/BGP 1PDF processing 1Perl 1Personal AI 1PII handling 1PiKVM 1Pilot scoping 1Platform engineering 1Plugin architecture 1Policy design 1Policy modeling 1Policy-as-code 2Prebuilds 1Private LLMs 2Problem framing 1Product design 1Product development 1Product engineering 1Production engineering 2Prompt experiments 1Prompt injection 1Prompt versioning 1Prompt workflows 1Prompting 1Provenance 2Pull-request workflows 1Pyodide 1Quality gates 1Quantization 2Quantized models 2Rapid prototyping 2Raspberry Pi 1rclone 2RDF 1Realtime systems 1Reasoning-model evaluation 1Reasoning-model training 2Recovery automation 1Regression testing 1Reinforcement learning 1Reliability 1Remote desktop delivery 1Remote development 1Replication 1Reproducibility 1Reproducible environments 1Resource optimization 1Resource pooling 1Resource scheduling 1Responsible disclosure 1restic 1Retrieval 1Reusable components 1Reverse proxies 1Review gates 1Reward design 1Risk analysis 1Risk awareness 1Router integration 1Routing 1Rust 2Sandbox forensics 1Scalable architecture 1Search indexing 1Secure coding 1Security advocacy 1Security evaluation 1Security reporting 1Security testing 1Self-service provisioning 1Separation of concerns 1Serialization security 1SharePoint 1Shizuku 1Shortcuts 1Small-model inference 1Snapshots 1Snowflake 1SOAP/XML 1Software distribution 1Speaker diarization 1Speech recognition 2SQL injection 1Staff engineering 1STAR reasoning 1State modeling 1State versioning 1Step Functions 1Storage 1Structured extraction 1Structured prompting 1STUN/ICE 1Synthetic data 1Systems administration 2Task orchestration 1tc/IFB 1TCP tuning 1Team delivery 1Technical communication 1Technical writing 2Tesseract 1Test design 1Text-to-speech 2Threat modeling 2Token accounting 1Token budgeting 1Tool execution 2Traffic shaping 1Training infrastructure 1Training-data engineering 1Transformers 1Tree-sitter 1TypeScript 1USB OTG 1Vector search 1Versioning 1Video 1Video platforms 1VMware 1Voice AI 1Voice-AI evaluation 1VPNs 1VS Code 2Vulnerability assessment 1VXLAN 1Web applications 2Web architecture 1WebAssembly 1Wi-Fi 1WireGuard 1Workflow automation 2Workflow design 2Workflow handoff 1Workload identity 1XenServer 1Zero Trust 1ZFS 1

Everything I've used

Self-reported. Some of these I used deeply, some briefly. Linked ones have a dated entry.

Programming & software

C, C++, C#, .NET, Go, Rust, Python, PHP, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Perl, Bash, Lua, Swift, AppleScript, React, Angular, Node.js, Deno, Spring, Symfony, Laravel, Rails, SQLAlchemy, Browser extensions, Design patterns, Testing, Metaprogramming

AI, agents & model research

Transformers, Attention, RAG, Knowledge graphs, FAISS, Qdrant, pgvector, LangChain, AutoGen, ReAct, MCP, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q Business, MLX, LoRA, GRPO, RLHF, SFT, LLM evaluation, LLM-as-Judge, Prompt versioning, Local inference, Embeddings, Mechanistic interpretability, Speech recognition, Speaker diarization, Kaldi, DeepSpeech, Tesseract, OCR, Computer vision

Data, search & caching

MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, IndexedDB, LevelDB, MQTT, Apache Solr, OpenRefine, InfluxDB, Airflow, Metabase, Redash, Redis, Memcached, FlashCache, Varnish, Squid

Storage & filesystems

Block storage, Object storage, FUSE, Overlay filesystems, NFS, iSCSI, Samba, ext filesystems, HFS, APFS, XFS, ZFS, GlusterFS, Ceph, Btrfs, JuiceFS, NBD, SCSI, Snapshots, Replication, Cloning, Storage caches

Cloud & delivery

AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OpenStack, OpenNebula, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, Travis CI, KMS, SSM Parameter Store, Docker BuildKit, OCI, Engineering metrics, Technical leadership, Developer onboarding

Virtualization & containers

QEMU, KVM, Proxmox, VMware, XenServer, libvirt, Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor, rust-vmm, LXC, LXD, Docker, Docker Swarm, Podman, Kata Containers, Kubernetes, GPU passthrough, PCI/USB passthrough, High availability, AppArmor, cgroups, Container plugins

Networks, Linux & identity

DNS, mDNS, DNS-over-TLS/HTTPS, Linux networking, Linux kernel modules, Ansible, HAProxy, Apache, NGINX, Caddy, Open vSwitch, VXLAN, FRRouting, OSPF/BGP, L2/L3 switching, Fibre networking, WireGuard, OpenVPN, IPsec, Tailscale, ZeroTier, Nebula, Cloudflare, Zero Trust, LDAP, Active Directory, OpenLDAP, SSO, Kerberos, RADIUS, SAML, Keycloak, SSH tunnels, iPXE, Netboot, DHCP, TCP tuning

Routers & firewalls

Cisco, MikroTik, OPNsense, pfSense, UniFi, OpenWrt, iptables, nftables, Vyatta, Traffic shaping, VPNs

Observability & operations

Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Logstash, Nagios, OpenNMS, Cacti, SmokePing, mtr, iperf, mtail, Monit, NetFlow, SNMP, Fail2ban, Tripwire, Lynis, Log analysis

Voice & device systems

Asterisk, FreePBX, RasPBX, 3CX, Opus, WebRTC, STUN/ICE, GSM/SMS, Kannel, Call recording, Amazon Connect, Apple MDM, PiKVM, ADB, Shizuku, USB OTG, Raspberry Pi

Security & forensics

Threat modeling, Vulnerability assessment, Security reporting, Secure coding, OSINT, Network packet analysis, Data recovery, Browser forensics, Protocol analysis, TLS inspection, Frida, Binary analysis, Firewall hardening, Mitmproxy, OpenSSL, Certificate authorities, AI security, Prompt injection, DLP, OAuth2, OIDC, RBAC, Audit logging, Sandbox forensics, Responsible disclosure

Projects

Personal projects, separate from my employer. Many are experiments or still in progress.

Agents

AgentRC

Writing down what an agent needs, so a platform can decide what to allow. dated entries →

Published working draft

agent-handoff

Versioned decisions and work state across AI sessions. dated entries →

Published tool

agentic-agile / aloop

Test-first workflows, review stages and explicit handoff. dated entries →

Published plugin / evolving workflow

CTXConfig

Symbol-aware context selection for coding agents. dated entries →

Prototype

Versioned agent state

Records of decisions and task state, not just transcripts. dated entries →

Design

PiKVM agent interface

Out-of-band recovery and hardware-control experiments. dated entries →

Prototype

MacPilot

Natural-language automation through macOS interfaces. dated entries →

Experiment

Training models

MLX training tooling

Configurable local reinforcement-learning and guided-training experiments. dated entries →

Development & research

Model inspection

Layer-wise predictions and comparison of adapted models. dated entries →

Research tooling

Knowledge and media tools

Lens

My own notes and files, searchable, with answers that cite sources and actions that need my approval. dated entries →

In development

anytopdf

Turning media and files into searchable documents. dated entries →

In development

Media ingestion

Reusable audio, video and image-processing pipelines. dated entries →

Development

Python in documents

Local browser execution with Pyodide and WebAssembly. dated entries →

Prototype

Storage and networks

JuiceFS fork

Storage backends, caching, replication and block access. dated entries →

Fork development

OpenWrt trafficctl

Bidirectional shaping, diagnostics and regression testing. dated entries →

Merged contribution

rclone / Emby integration

Filesystem-backed media integrations. dated entries →

Prototype / unmerged upstream proposal

Snapback

Read-only backup history and copy-back restoration. dated entries →

Design

ReqWall

Portable request policies with replaceable enforcers. dated entries →

Prototype

Developer workspaces

Browser IDEs, environment images, microVMs and starting and stopping workspaces on demand. dated entries →

Experiments

Writing

Things I've written, newest first. Each first appeared on Medium; readable copies live here.

Latent Contextual Reinforcement: Teaching Language Models to Think Better Without Changing Their…

Teaching a Small Model to Think

I Built a 4B Model That Thinks for 14 Minutes Before Admitting It Doesn’t Know

AI: The New Bicycle for the Mind

The Quantum Leap: Navigating the Future with AI and Quantum Computing

Corporate Australia’s Eye-Opening Jolting Introduction with the Power of Open Source

How Generative AI is Outsmarting Traditional Machine Learning Methods

Iterative Approach to Discovering Gen AI Opportunities for Business Impact. The AI Agent way

OpenAI and its Ceo following Jef bazez

Unleashing the Power of Collaborative Edge AI: A Paradigm Shift

All posts →  ·  On Medium ↗