iqbalsyamil

The floor, not the ceiling

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three attempts. Three different ways in. One lesson about how work actually gets done.

The first attempt

A few years ago I became obsessed with a problem nobody had officially asked me to solve: we had no reliable way to know who owned what service. Ownership was scattered — in people’s heads, in Slack threads, in documentation that was already outdated the moment it was written.

So I started collecting it. Built a Notion database, mapped services to teams, planned to migrate it into our own system eventually. The vision was clear to me: you can’t build an internal developer platform without knowing what you’re building it on top of.

Good ideas don't ship on merit

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Four years of CI, two market cycles, and the thing we still haven’t solved

The pattern

There’s a conversation that happens in every cycle. Different quarter, different context, same shape. Something is expensive or broken or inefficient. Everyone senses it. The urgency peaks, then dissolves. The moment passes and we move on. Next cycle, the conversation returns — same contours, different numbers.

After enough cycles you stop being surprised by the pattern and start asking a different question: what would it look like to get ahead of it instead of reacting to it?

about

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, I’m Iqbal — SRE and platform engineer at Pintu, a crypto exchange based in Indonesia.

I’ve been at Pintu since the pre-seed days, all the way through Series B. I’ve seen the infrastructure go from a single VM, through Nomad, and eventually to Kubernetes — and I’ve had a hand in most of that journey.

Along the way I’ve handled production infrastructure for some of Pintu’s core products — Pintu retail app, Web3 Wallet, and Rupiah Token among them. Beyond the usual SRE work — monitoring, on-call, SLAs, keeping things up — I also own the CI platform end-to-end: the runner fleet, the tooling, the whole thing. It serves multiple monorepos and 100+ engineers across the company.

work with me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I help founders and early teams turn product ideas into reliable, production-ready systems — from zero to market.

My work is useful when you know what you want to build, but need a technical path that can actually survive launch: architecture, infrastructure, delivery flow, reliability, observability, and the tradeoffs between moving fast and building something that will not collapse when people start using it.

I have helped teams take products from early concept to functioning systems in production, with enough reliability and scalability to keep growing after launch.