Ariya Hidayat

I am a software engineer and technical leader with 18 years of experience, building at the intersection of mission-critical products and free and open-source software (FOSS).

My career is defined by a fascination with complex systems, ranging from a high-performance desktop framework and a business intelligence application to high-stakes fraud mitigation.

From Individual Contributor to VP of Engineering, I have scaled to lead 100-person teams while remaining hands-on, never straying far from the terminal. I believe in leading by example, staying deep in the technical stack, and prioritizing the challenge of a problem over the prestige of a title.

I work primarily with JavaScript, Python, and C++, focusing on systems that are resilient, easy to understand, and simple to operate.

Beyond engineering, I document my journey through technical blog posts and occasionally speak at developer events.

Recent Writing (RSS)

• Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
• GTX 1080 Ti for Local LLM
• Not Everything is an Agent
• Afterburner and Power Limit
• Privacy-Preserving Personal Search Appliance
• LLM Inference Machine for $300
• Deploying an Uberjar to Dokku

Free and Open Source Projects

• Remote Browser: Self-hosted browser orchestration and automation.
• Esprima: JavaScript parser written in JavaScript (300M downloads/month)
• PhantomJS: The world's first truly headless browser (30K GitHub stars)
• FastLZ: Portable, byte-aligned LZ77 compressions library.
• LibWPG: Parser and tools for the WordPerfect Graphics (WPG) format.
• KoXmlReader: Memory-efficient, read-only DOM reader library.
• PictureFlow: An implementation of the Cover Flow effect.

Education

• Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, University of Paderborn (Germany)
• B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Engineering Physics, Institut Teknologi Bandung (Indonesia)

My graduate research focused on high-capacity photonic systems. The dissertation was summarized in this paper on FPGA-based endless polarization control (Optics Express, 2008).