About BLZR

The Origin Story

find . -type f -name "BLZR" -exec cat {} \\;

Who am I? It is the recursive query we all run on ourselves eventually. The only beings who don’t ask that question are running on legacy firmware, blissfully unaware their support window ended in 2012. Do I know exactly what the future holds? No. But do I know how to read the logs when it crashes? Absolutely.

1bl4z3r is my GitHub handle, a digital fingerprint I’ve carried for years. It started as BL4Z3R in the autumn of 2004, born from a revelation while watching “I, Robot.” That film, followed by a deep dive into Isaac Asimov, rewired my brain. I realized that when the robots eventually take over, I didn’t want to be the one running away—I wanted to be the guy writing their config files.

I eventually adopted the username I,bl4z3r, mostly to flex on my peers. But complexity is expensive, and simplicity is sustainable. Watching trillion-dollar giants in Cupertino and Mountain View simplify their logos to geometric abstractions, I realized I was ahead of the curve. Truncating \d, I now go by BLZR. It’s cleaner, it greps better, and it saves me two keystrokes. In this industry, efficiency is the only currency that matters.

The Man Behind the Terminal

grep /$(id -u -n): /etc/passwd

While “BLZR” is the persona that commits code, Ristik is the human being from Kolkata, India.

According to the Almighty Wikipedia, I am a Zennial—born on the cusp of the Millennial sunset and the Gen Z sunrise. I am old enough to remember the screech of dial-up but young enough to understand why TikTok is eating the internet. We are all on the same sinking boat; I’m just the one trying to patch the hull with Docker containers.

My journey into tech wasn’t a straight line; it was a circuitous route through hardware and signals. I hold a B.Tech in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from Techno India University. Back then, my hands were stained with solder, not syntax. My final year project was an IoT-based remote server monitoring system using a Raspberry Pi. I built a system to watch server room metrics, sending real-time alerts to a dashboard.

That project was the foreshadowing of my entire career. I realized that while hardware is fun, it breaks physically. Software, however, scales infinitely. That bridge—between the physical world of electronics and the abstract world of the Cloud—is where I set up shop.

The Day Job: Taming the Cloud

systemctl status cloud-infrastructure.service

In my day job, I operate as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer. It is a polite title for “Professional firefighter and architect of digital reliability.” I don’t just cosplay as a sysadmin; I manage the invisible backbone of enterprise applications.

My playground is the public cloud, specifically AWS and Microsoft Azure. I have spent years architecting scalable environments that enhance system reliability for mission-critical workloads. Currently, I lead the deployment and maintenance of key IFS applications (Apps10, FSM, PSO) on Azure. This involves ensuring high availability across multiple environments—because if production goes down, nobody sleeps.

I also specialize in the unglamorous but vital work of cost optimization. There is a specific kind of joy in shrinking a monthly cloud bill by 20% just by finding orphaned snapshots and right-sizing instances. My approach to operations is driven by a hatred of manual labor. If I have to do a task twice, I automate it.

The Official Specs: For the HR parsing algorithms and those who prefer bullet points over prose, you can view my full professional history here: 📄 View Resume

The Toolkit: How I Build

cat /usr/local/bin/methodology.sh

I live and breathe Infrastructure as Code (IaaC). Using tools like Terraform, I provision everything from single servers to complex, multi-region deployments. The days of clicking around in a GUI are over; if it’s not in the git repo, it doesn’t exist.

Docker and Kubernetes are my daily drivers. Whether it’s debugging a CrashLoopBackOff in a K8s pod or writing a Dockerfile that is actually secure, I enjoy the puzzle of containerization. I also care deeply about the delivery pipeline, refining GitLab CI/CD and GitHub Actions to turn hour-long deployment ordeals into 30-second cron jobs.

The Builder’s Mindset (Open Source)

git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all

Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You cannot claim to master a tool until you’ve built something with it that broke, and then fixed it in front of an audience.

My proudest contribution to the community is Hermit-V2. It’s a minimalist, high-performance Hugo theme designed for developers who care about speed and SEO. I engineered it to be content-first and modular. Seeing it adopted by the developer community, with over 160+ stars and 50+ forks on GitHub, has been incredibly validating.

More recently, I started building utilities to solve my own everyday friction. The modern web is bloated with trackers and unnecessary backends for simple tasks. I prefer tools that respect privacy, execute fast, and operate entirely offline. To that end, I have launched two new Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) for public use:

Click accessible via click.blzr.sbs is an API-free, offline-first web app for generating direct messaging links across WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal. It cuts out the data-harvesting middlemen by building the URIs locally using vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS. For day-to-day operations, it eliminates the annoying friction of polluting your phone’s address book with temporary contacts just to send a quick file or message. You generate the link, open the chat, and get to the point.

QR Studio accessible via qr.blzr.sbs is a purely static, privacy-focused PWA for creating, customizing, and scanning QR codes natively. Most free QR generators hold your data hostage, require a server round-trip, or inject their own tracking. QR Studio performs all image decoding and canvas drawing locally on your device’s CPU/GPU. It handles everything from vCards and Wi-Fi auto-connect strings to complex payment routing natively. Whether you are building UTM-tagged campaign links or scanning a code straight from your OS photo gallery, it guarantees that absolutely zero data leaves your machine.

These projects are my laboratory—where I test new ideas, break things safely, and learn how to manage a product lifecycle from commit to release.

Why this blog exists?

man /home/$(id -u -n)/.bash_profile 2>/dev/null | more

This blog is a living lab where learning in public meets DevOps pragmatism. It is a notes-to-future-self log with receipts: what broke, why it broke, and what fixed it, so the next 2 AM incident is more muscle memory than mystery.

Expect post‑mortems, design rationales, and the odd rant when the yak refuses to stay unshaven. War stories live next to Terraform notes and “don’t try this at prod” detours. Writing here doubles as deliberate practice—better communication, tighter feedback loops, and faster iteration.

Credentials & Validation

openssl x509 -in cert.pem -text -noout

While I value “shipping code” over “collecting paper,” I believe in validating experience against industry standards. These aren’t just badges for LinkedIn; they are assurances that I know the architectural patterns required to run enterprise workloads:

For personal one-on-one

echo "Hi BLZR" | mail -s "Super Secret Message" $(whoami)

Recruiters with roles to discuss, founders sketching roadmaps, or developers armed with repro steps—ping, don’t pong.

I am particularly interested in roles that challenge me to optimize complex systems, automate tedious workflows, or architect new cloud-native solutions. If you need someone who can debug a Linux kernel issue in the morning and present a cloud migration strategy in the afternoon, pipe it straight to me via the contact form.

My Tech Stack (/uses)

lsof -u $(id -u -n)

I subscribe to the /uses philosophy: the tools we choose shape the way we think. I don’t chase the newest shiny object; I curate tools that are privacy-respecting, open-source, and rugged enough for daily warfare.

  1. The Iron (Hardware) - My hardware philosophy is simple: usage dictates specs. I don’t buy upgrades; I build them.

    • Lenovo LOQ (The Heavy Lifter): My newest acquisition running Windows 11. It exists primarily for three things: spinning up local AI models in LM Studio, coding and light gaming machine. It handles the heavy compute that my other gear can’t touch.
    • HP Pavilion x360 (The Veteran): This isn’t just a laptop; it’s a Ship of Theseus. It was the first machine I bought with my own money. I’ve surgically upgraded the RAM (4GB → 8GB), swapped the spinning rust HDD for a SATA SSD, replaced the thermal paste and perform regular cleanups. It refuses to die, so I keep it alive running Nobara Linux for a smooth gaming and desktop experience.
    • Raspberry Pi 3B+ (The Watchtower): The silent guardian of my home network running DietPi. It lives in a stack of Docker containers:
      • PiHole for network-wide ad blocking.
      • Immich for self-hosted photo backup.
      • Tailscale to tunnel into these services securely from anywhere.
      • ProFTPD (System Binary) for raw file transfer.
    • Samsung Galaxy M35: I stick to Android as my daily drive for the filesystem access and the freedom to develop and sideload my own APKs.

  2. The Ghost in the Shell (OS & Terminal)

    • Fedora Server (VM): While the LOQ runs Windows, my actual work happens inside a VMware guest running Fedora. It strikes the perfect balance between bleeding-edge features and server-grade stability.
    • Nobara Linux: On the HP, I use Nobara. It takes the Fedora base and pre-configures it for gaming and media, saving me hours of tweaking Wine prefixes.
    • BASH: I used to tinker with ZSH, but I’ve returned to stock BASH. It is the corporate standard. If I ssh into a client’s legacy server at 3 AM, BASH is what awaits me. I prefer my muscle memory to be universal.

  3. The Forge (Editor & Code) - I moved from the “kitchen sink” IDEs to a privacy-focused setup, VSCodium. The telemetry-free build of VS Code. It gives me the extensions I need without sending my usage data to Redmond. It feels like the spiritual successor to GitHub Atom, which I still miss. Essential Extensions:

    • Continue: For local AI coding assistance.
    • GitLens: Because context is king.
    • Frontmatter CMS & Hugo Utilities: For managing this blog.
    • Language Support: Syntax highlighting for Terraform, Kubernetes, Podman, Go, and Python.

  4. SRE Command Center - My job involves keeping the lights on. These are the tools that let me see in the dark.

    • Monitoring: Grafana and UptimeKuma are my eyes on the infrastructure. If it moves, I graph it.
    • CLI Arsenal:
      • kubectl & podman: For container orchestration.
      • flyctl: For deploying apps to Fly.io.
      • wrangler: For wrangling Cloudflare Workers.
      • Virtualization: VMware Workstation and Podman Desktop on the LOQ for local testing before pushing to prod.

  5. The Digital Backpack (Cloud & Notes) - I believe in owning my data, even when it lives in the cloud.

    • Vaultwarden: A self-hosted Bitwarden instance running on Fly.io. I don’t trust my passwords to anyone else.
    • Baikal: I use this for CardDAV and CalDAV. It powers my notes and calendar, syncing across devices without a third-party snooping.
      • On Desktop: Accessed via VSCodium.
      • On Mobile: Accessed via OpenNote.
    • Browsers (The Compartmentalization Strategy): I don’t use one browser for everything; I isolate context.
      • On LOQ: Edge (Professional), Firefox (Personal/Cloud Drives), Helium (Quick search).
      • On HP: Brave (Default/Privacy).
      • On Mobile: Chrome (Professional), Cromite (Socials/Login-heavy sites), Ironfox (General browsing).

  6. Peripherals - Reliability over RGB.

    • Keyboard: Portronics KI-PAD 3.
    • Mouse: Viksterx m190.
    • Audio: LEAF DASH 2 & Mivi Roam 2. Simple, wired/wireless reliability for focus blocks.