Finding Light in the Quiet

If you looked at my LinkedIn profile or résumé today, you'd see a list of certifications, engineering roles, and community numbers. What that list doesn't show is that I'm still, first and foremost, an ordinary learner — someone who has stumbled more than once, leaned on other people's kindness, and been given more second chances than I can count.

I was born on 13 October 2001. My path since then has run through some difficult seasons: sensory-related eating struggles as a small child, a period of about a year and a half spent almost entirely withdrawn from the world, and — diagnosed only in adulthood — a mind that is wired differently than most (ADHD and Autism Spectrum).

I'm writing this story down not to celebrate what I've achieved, but to document it honestly. If anything here is useful, I hope it becomes a companion and a small light for anyone quietly fighting their own battle right now.

I arrived by emergency cesarean, and the first days of my life were spent in a hospital incubator — a critical beginning, by every account from my family. My parents first considered the name Azri Hafisuddin: Azri, meaning 'helper,' and Hafisuddin, 'guardian of faith.' In the end they chose Rahmat Wibowo instead, anchored in a simple prayer — that rahmat, mercy, would mark my life with blessing, benefit, and compassion for others.

That prayer became a compass, especially as my body and mind met more limits than most children face early on. From infancy until around age six, I struggled seriously with eating — what I now understand as ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder), tied to strong sensory sensitivity. My body rejected solid textures easily, and while other children explored a world of flavors, I got by on milk and a narrow handful of bland, soft foods.

I didn't taste fried chicken until third grade, chicken noodles until my first semester of university, and I couldn't finish a bowl of chicken porridge without discomfort until my seventh semester — at a small food stall in Cisitu, Bandung. I didn't understand it then, but the root was sensory processing differences connected to autism spectrum traits.

My family carries a strong Javanese heritage from Yogyakarta, with a lineage that traces back — through family accounts — to the era of the Demak Sultanate. What matters to me is not the myth of a distinguished bloodline, but the reminder that every family carries its own history and its own part in shaping who we become.

Between 2021 and 2023, I was fortunate to be shaped by mentors and teammates at several organizations, each teaching me something I still carry.

At Grab (Aug 2021–Feb 2022), as a Software Engineer Intern on the DigitalGoods team, I got a front-row seat to how systems serving millions of users are built and maintained — disciplined code, rigorous code review, and a culture of reliability.

In Bangkit Academy (Feb–Jul 2022), a collaboration between Google, Tokopedia, Gojek, and Traveloka, my team placed in the top 53 out of hundreds. That is where my interest in cloud infrastructure took root — managing REST APIs with Go on Google Cloud Run, working with PostgreSQL, and orchestrating a simple machine-learning pipeline.

A short Solutions Architect internship at Amazon Web Services in Singapore (Jun–Aug 2022) widened my view of what a well-architected, cost-efficient, globally secure system actually looks like — learned directly from practitioners across the region.

And at Xendit (Feb 2022–Jul 2023), under patient, capable seniors, I became the DevOps and Cloud engineer I am today: rightsizing AWS infrastructure for cost efficiency, writing reusable Terraform modules for RDS and ElastiCache, configuring Amazon EKS networking with Security Groups and Calico policies, rolling out AWS VPC Endpoints, learning GitOps deployment with ArgoCD, and supporting PCI DSS compliance and disaster-recovery readiness. Every milestone there was a team effort and a gift of patient mentorship, not something I built alone.

Somewhere in that season, I started forming a habit: writing down what I was learning and sharing it on LinkedIn. What began as a small circle of classmates slowly grew as I stayed active in discussions, took on internships, and wrote about the technical lessons I was picking up.

The chart below is not a vanity metric to me — it's a record of thousands of individual moments where someone chose to connect, reply, or share something useful.

Every point on that line is a person who was generous with their time.

In 2024, I took on a Cloud Engineer role in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (Feb 2024–Aug 2025). Working inside a cross-cultural team stretched my communication, my adaptability, and — just as importantly — my humility in understanding how an international team actually operates.

I helped modernize infrastructure from AWS CloudFormation to Terraform, built standardized Terraform modules so fellow developers could deploy safely, learned to build CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for staged rollouts, and used Ansible to simplify routine configuration management.

Alongside the work, I set aside time to validate my theoretical understanding through certification exams — not as trophies, but as a disciplined way to close knowledge gaps that could otherwise let a team down in the field.

Once my health began to stabilize, I felt a clear pull to put whatever energy I had back into contributing to others.

At Rakamin Academy (Jul 2025), I had the chance to mentor participants in BNI's IT OPS ODP Batch 2 program, covering Java Spring Boot, the ELK Stack, foundational web security (OWASP), and databases. Teaching turned out to be the best test of whether I truly understood what I'd learned myself.

At PT Pertamina Marine Solutions (Aug 2025–Mar 2026), as a DevOps and Software Engineer, I supported the IT team and coordinated with internal developers and vendor partners: helping right-size Microsoft Azure cloud spend and plan Reserved Instances, supporting an internal AI application built with .NET, React, and Azure OpenAI using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation approach for internal documentation, standardizing infrastructure-as-code configuration with Terraform, improving Service Desk ticketing transparency, and drafting IT roadmap proposals for long-term efficiency.

That experience trained me to communicate with a wide range of stakeholders — from fellow engineers to senior leadership — in language that stayed respectful and solution-oriented.

Outside of technology, I also began volunteering as an Umrah travel agent in Jakarta, helping pilgrims prepare for their journey to the Holy Land — a quiet space of service that keeps reminding me to stay grounded and to give sincerely.

As my physical and mental health recovered, my connection to the community warmed back up too. Looking back at when my network grew fastest, the busiest stretch peaked around September 2023 — not by coincidence, but tied directly to the seasons when I was most active in learning, earning certifications, and opening up spaces to share with fellow community members.

Even though my background is rooted in cloud and DevOps, some of my most rewarding exchanges have come from conversations with people in data, product, design, and management — each one sharpening how I see a technology problem from more than one angle.

Because I remember how disoriented I once felt trying to find my own direction in the technology world, I started InfraLoka in March 2026 from a simple conviction: it should be a bridge for Indonesia's tech talent to learn together, exchange experience, and reach global opportunity.

Step by step, together with friends who share that same vision, we have been building an open discussion forum and learning space on Discord and educational channels, mentorship initiatives and knowledge-sharing sessions with infrastructure practitioners, a growing network of young talent deepening their skills in Cloud, DevOps, and Platform Engineering, and Indonesian-language educational content written to be genuinely easy to understand.

This mission was never about personal achievement. It is about how we grow further, together, as one ecosystem — and about reaching for AI, deliberately and often, so that everyone on that journey can move faster and be served better.

If I step back and put the last several years into numbers, here is what that journey of showing up, sharing, and connecting adds up to.

Behind every metric here is a real person who took the time to talk, share knowledge, and offer support.

If anyone asks why I chose to document this journey in such detail, the honest answer is gratitude. Everyone starts from a different line, with different privileges and different struggles. Looking back — from a child who struggled to eat, to a student wrestling with his own mind, to someone who once withdrew from the world for a year and a half — I recognize how much I owe to God's mercy, my family's support, and the guidance of doctors and friends along the way.

Statistically, facing serious mental-health challenges while still finishing my studies and building a career wasn't the easy path. But I don't see that as proof that I'm exceptional. I see it as a reminder that no situation is truly impossible to recover from, if we are willing to ask for help and refuse to give up.

Every opportunity I have been given — studying at ITB, interning at technology companies, and eventually starting InfraLoka — is a trust I have to repay by continuing to help whoever needs a hand.

If it helps to sum up the technical ground I keep learning and deepening: cloud platforms across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure; infrastructure-as-code and configuration with Terraform and Ansible; containers and orchestration with Docker, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD; observability with Datadog, CloudWatch, and Prometheus/Grafana; languages including Go, Python, TypeScript, C#, and Java; web frameworks like React, Next.js, .NET, and Spring Boot; and databases spanning PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, and MySQL.

But above every tool on that list, the value I learned most from the hardest years is simple: humility to keep learning, the courage to ask for help when it hurts, and sincerity in reaching out a hand to others.