22 Years of bigwisu.com — and Now I Blog with an AI

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..”

Twenty-two years of bigwisu.com later, not much has changed on that front.

The blog has been the infrastructure journal.

2004: new server. 2006: built an enterprise WAN across Jakarta, Surabaya and Medan using Speedy and OpenVPN because a real MPLS circuit was 8 million rupiah a month. 2007: virtualised the server on an AMD Athlon 64 with 2GB RAM - “sangatlah berlebih,” I wrote. 2019: resigned from VP of Engineering at Axiata Digital to join a cloud computing company that wanted a stronger presence in Indonesia. That company turned out to be Google. 2020: stood on a virtual stage during COVID with Sundar Pichai and Thomas Kurian for the Google Cloud Jakarta region launch.

Each of those moments has a post on this blog. Not polished, not edited for posterity - just written when it happened. That’s the archive.

What I didn’t expect was the gap.

There’s almost nothing between 2020 and 2023. The Google years were full - launching a region, growing a team, working with hundreds of Indonesian organisations on cloud adoption - but I wasn’t writing. The irony isn’t lost on me. The blog that started as a personal infrastructure journal went quiet precisely when the infrastructure work got most interesting.

2023 came back with a civet caught on CCTV, of all things. Then doctoral research into AI-driven decision making. Then vibe coding - an honest account of what AI-assisted development actually feels like from someone who knows the architecture well enough to catch its mistakes.

Now: CTO of IBM Indonesia, blogging with IBM Bob.

This post was written with IBM Bob - IBM’s end-to-end SDLC AI assistant. The same tool that today helped me upgrade this blog from Hugo v0.147 to v0.165, fix twenty-year-old WordPress export artefacts (duplicate tags: keys that Hugo finally refused to accept), and set up a Cloudinary upload pipeline so dropping a screenshot into a folder turns into a production URL automatically.

There’s something fitting about that. I spent years explaining to Indonesian organisations that AI is not a replacement for engineering judgment - it speeds up execution, the thinking is still yours. Turns out that applies to blogging too.

The pipeline is cleaner now than it has ever been. Hugo builds in under 400ms, deploys to Firebase on every push to release, and the whole thing runs on GitLab CI without a single manually managed credential on my laptop.

The next twenty plus years should be interesting.