vim hello-world.md

Hello, World!

A quick introduction - who I am, what I build, and why I'm starting this blog.

Omar Alani January 26, 2026 3 min read
personalopen-sourcelinux

“The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them.” - Ibn al-Haytham

Hey there! I’m Omar - a Senior Software Engineer based in Austin, TX. Welcome to my corner of the internet.

What I Do

By day, I work on cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and DevOps automation. I’ve spent the last few years helping teams migrate to EKS, implement GitOps workflows, and build AI-driven automation pipelines. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching a well-architected system hum along smoothly.

But honestly? I just really like building things.

The Stack I Love

My daily drivers are Go and Crystal for systems work, with a healthy appreciation for TypeScript when the frontend calls. I’m a Linux enthusiast through and through - Arch with KDE Plasma on Wayland is my setup, and yes, I use vim btw.

Kubernetes has become second nature. Whether it’s debugging pod networking at 2am or writing FreeLens extensions to make cluster management less painful, I genuinely enjoy the puzzle of distributed systems.

Things That Keep Me Going

When I’m not staring at a terminal:

  • Reading - Always have a book going
  • One Piece - The greatest story ever told, fight me
  • Gaming - Decompressing with some games when the code just won’t cooperate
  • Teaching - Mentoring junior engineers is one of the most rewarding parts of my job

Open Source

I believe in building in public. Here are some projects I’ve been working on:

CC-Relay - A multi-provider proxy for Claude Code that lets you pool rate limits across multiple API keys and providers. Built in Go because performance matters when you’re proxying every token.

Termisu - A terminal UI library for Crystal with cell-based rendering and double buffering. Because sometimes you want the power of a TUI without leaving Crystal-land.

require "termisu"

termisu = Termisu.new
begin
  "Hello World".each_char_with_index do |char, i|
    termisu.set_cell(i, 0, char, fg: Color.green)
  end
  termisu.render

  loop do
    if event = termisu.poll_event(100)
      break if event.is_a?(Termisu::Event::Key) && event.key.escape?
    end
  end
ensure
  termisu.close
end

kgithub - Bringing GitHub to your KDE Plasma desktop. Because the best tools are the ones that fit your workflow.

FreeLens Extensions - Interactive force-directed graph visualization of K8s resources. Plus the duplicate extension for quickly cloning resources.

I’ve also contributed to projects like Hotwire/Turbo, Grafito, and various Rails ecosystem gems.

Why This Blog?

I want a place to share what I’m learning and building. Expect posts about:

  • Infrastructure - Kubernetes, GitOps, cloud architecture
  • Go & Crystal - Systems programming, performance, CLI tools
  • Agentic AI - MCP servers, Claude Code workflows, automation
  • Linux - Desktop customization, Wayland, KDE hacking

No fluff, no SEO-optimized listicles. Just real engineering problems and how I’m solving them.

Let’s build something cool.

cd ~/blogs cd ~