Visited IKN this week as IBM Indonesia is part of a USTDA-funded smart city initiative supporting Otorita IKN, and I was there as part of that engagement, talking about IBM Bob. Got a peek inside the Nusantara Command Center (the ICCC, Integrated Command and Control Center). The screen is huge. Tipinya gedhe banget..

Walking in there was a sign saying no photos. Noted. Toured the room, took it all in. Then at the end the staff offered to take a group photo in front of the wall. So apparently that was fine. The wall behind us had: traffic intersection dashboards with live CCTV feeds and queue length graphs, vehicle speed and density readouts, signal phase timers, fleet GPS positions on a map, a national fire hotspot heatmap, solar field power curves, network telemetry. All of it live, all of it filling most of the wall. Impressive as a piece of engineering. Impressive as a statement of intent. Someone clearly had a budget.

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The handle bigwisu goes back to the 1990s. The domain bigwisu.com is 22 years old this year - registered sometime around 2004, when a Pentium II 350 running Slackware was sitting under a desk somewhere in Jakarta, serving HTML to whoever cared to read it. I wrote: “Finally I got around to finish setting up my new server.. Setting a server like this is not so much the effort in how to do so.. but its always finding enough time to do so..”

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I tried Vibe Coding properly for the first time on a real project — an Angular frontend talking to a headless CMS, using Gemini Code Assist throughout. Here’s what actually happened.

Context matters more than the prompt box.

The chat interface alone wasn’t enough for anything non-trivial. What worked was writing the feature requirements in a .md file - structured, specific, with field names, API contracts, and expected behaviour - and feeding that as context. The generated code went from generic scaffolding to something I could actually use. Side effect: those .md files become reasonable first-draft documentation too.

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Four and a half years working with Indonesian organisations on Google Cloud has given me a front-row seat to how decisions actually get made.. and how rarely the data behind those decisions is any good. During the pandemic, I watched businesses scramble to make calls with incomplete information. That stuck with me.

The specific problem I kept running into: surveys and feedback mechanisms produce shallow data. Static questionnaires get gamed, abandoned, or answered on autopilot. The signal is weak. Generative AI changes what’s possible here - a conversational agent can probe, clarify, and adapt in ways a form never could.

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A few weeks back I started finding unpleasant surprises on the canopy of my rear porch. Naturally I blamed the cats.

Luckily my home setup already had this covered. I’m running Home Assistant and Frigate on an old ACER VERITON L4620G I repurposed as a Docker server. Frigate does the object detection with a Coral Edge TPU doing the inferencing, so the main CPU doesn’t sweat it. I added a new camera aimed at the porch and configured Frigate to watch for cats and people.

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Bahasan lebih lanjut soal diskusi terdahulu dengan Kelsey Hightower, dimana saya menjadi narasumber untuk acara Developer Space Google Singapore dalam topik How to become a Cloud Engineer.

Enjoy

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Kelsey Hightower adalah Principal Engineer di Google Cloud, beliau adalah salah satu wajah paling terkemuka dan dihormati di cloud computing dan opensource software. Dia telah menjadi salah satu pembicara paling populer di bidang entreprise technology selama beberapa tahun, dengan mengawinkan pengetahuan teknis dan stroy telling.

Saya berkesempatan diskusi mengenai bagaimana sukses berkarir sebagai seorang engineer.

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