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seasons: sensory-related eating struggles as a small child, a period of about a year and a half spent almost entirely withdrawn from the world, and, diagnosed only in adulthood, a mind that is wired differently than most (ADHD and Autism Spectrum).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.

Being accepted into Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) felt like an enormous trust, one I owed my best effort to honor. Among thousands of talented students from across Indonesia, I tried to give everything I had. In my very first year I was recognized as Best New Student with a 4.00 GPA, and in 2023 I graduated Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Engineering.

Underneath those results was a mind that worked in bursts I didn't yet have a name for. My thoughts and my lecturers' voices would often loop for hours after class, a pattern connected to neurodivergent traits I wouldn't understand until years later. It let me absorb material quickly, but it also meant my mind rarely rested.

I came to believe that classroom theory needed to be tested against the real world as early as possible, so I started looking for internships and side projects wherever I could find them. In April 2021, I landed my first: a fullstack Android internship at PT Cybertrend Intrabuana, followed by freelance projects that sharpened my problem-solving and gave me a feel for what the software industry actually needed.

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.

A professional network, to me, is a wide classroom. Every person I connect with carries something new I can learn: from the AWS practitioners and founders who became sources of wisdom, to the students and fresh graduates who remind me of exactly where I started.

Looking across that network, spanning founders and C-level leaders down to interns, spread across engineering, data, product, design, and management, kept reshaping how I think about technology: never as a narrow specialty, but as something best understood through many different vantage points at once.

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.

Heading into 2026, I have tried to divide my time deliberately between professional work, community initiatives, and service to others.

Since April 2026, I have supported an engineering team based in Bavaria, Germany as a Senior DevOps Engineer (Consultant), working under local engineering leadership to maintain the reliability of AWS and Azure systems, optimize container workloads on ECS and Kubernetes, and automate deployment.

A short collaboration with the team at Liven in April 2026 let me help review incident-response practices against standard SRE references, take part in their internal AI Guild discussions, and help start a simple book-sharing club for the team.

And I've continued to make time to serve pilgrims as an Umrah travel agent in Jakarta, a reminder that meaningful service doesn't have to live inside a job title.

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 you are reading this while feeling alone in the dark, left behind, or worn down from caring for your own mental health, please believe this: you are not walking through it alone, and it will not stay this heavy forever.

Health, peace of mind, and the ability to smile again did not arrive for me overnight. It was built slowly, one breath and one day at a time. If today feels unbearably heavy, it is alright to rest for a moment, breathe deeply, and reach out for professional help when you need it. There is always hope, and a brighter tomorrow is still waiting ahead.