Off the clock · Pune · October 2026

Syed Faiz Imam, after hoursOff‑call

I'm Faiz Imam, a backend engineer. Here's an evening of everything else, from sunset cricket to 2am: books, records, guitar, PS5 and the map of where I've been.

6:40 pm

Cricket before dark

I play cricket whenever there's a ground and enough people. Take guard and face a ball. last over before the light goes

Scoreboard
0/0 0.0 ov
This over

Take guard. The bowler is at the top of his mark.

7:30 pm

The study

50 books from Syed Faiz Imam's shelves, bound in leather and gold. It's getting dark in here. fifty and counting

Novels
Classics and other worlds
Mind and meaning
History, science and money
50 volumes · Ex libris Syed Faiz Imam
8:30 pm

Records on

Sufi and qawwali, film songs and hip-hop. Drop a record on the platter. turn it up

Nothing spinning yet.

9:15 pm

/now

The corkboard by the desk: what Syed Faiz Imam is focused on this month, and what he's learning.

this month

Owning the vehicle damage-detection module for Vidal International.
Keeping the voicebot steady past 500,000 calls a month.
Reading history and fiction after work.
Planning the next trip: the Northeast is next on the map.

updated October 2026

currently learning

Computer vision for vehicle damage detectionbuilding it at workdeep in it
Evaluating fine-tuned vision-language modelsafter the Qwen2.5-VL migrationin progress
Distributed systems, from the original papersKafka, Raft, Dynamoup next
10:10 pm

Guitar on the balcony

I play guitar. Run a finger across the strings, or pick a chord. sound on

pick a chord, then strum

or play something from the songbook

11:20 pm

Player two

The PS5 den. Pick a game from the rack, then press ✕ to insert the disc. one more mission

PLAYER TWO
choose a game
PRESS ✕ TO INSERT
○ to eject

d-pad to browse · ✕ insert · ○ eject · △ surprise me · □ photo mode

1:30 am

Tabs and drafts

Laptop open, lights off: the tech and history blogs Faiz Imam keeps coming back to, and the posts he wants to write next.

reading · 7 tabs open
techThe Pragmatic EngineerGergely Orosz

How big tech teams actually build, ship and run software.

techByteByteGoAlex Xu

System design explained with clear diagrams.

techNetflix TechBlogNetflix

Streaming, data and reliability at enormous scale.

techThe Cloudflare BlogCloudflare

Networking and incident write-ups with real depth.

historyA Collection of Unmitigated PedantryBret Devereaux

Military and economic history, taken seriously and told well.

historyJSTOR Daily: HistoryJSTOR

Short history pieces backed by scholarship.

historySmithsonian: HistorySmithsonian Magazine

Stories from the past, from archaeology to the modern era.

drafts
  • From a database queue to Kafka: how a voicebot survived 2× traffictechidea
  • Replacing GPT-4o with a fine-tuned Qwen2.5-VL, and the 74% cost cuttechidea
  • What 50 million phone calls taught me about retriestechidea
  • Dak chowki: the Mughal relay post that worked like a message queuehistoryidea
  • The Silk Road as the first distributed systemhistoryidea
  • Atomic Habits for engineers: systems over goals, in codebooksidea
  • Sapiens and the shared stories software runs onbooksidea
2:04 am

The window

Can't sleep, so: India at night, lit up where Syed Faiz Imam has travelled. Hover or tap a state. the northeast is next

Pune
22places visited

19 of 28 states, plus Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. The Northeast and Kerala are next.

visitednot yethome, Pune

Visited: Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Delhi, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana.

State boundaries: DataMeet (MIT licence).