Some journeys don't start with tutorials.
Mine started with one random question at 2am.
"How does a computer actually work?"
Not how to use one.
Not how to code on one.
How does it actually work — underneath everything.
That question pulled me into a two-month rabbit hole.
Jacquard looms. Babbage's machine. Ada Lovelace.
Vacuum tubes. Relays. Punch cards. Transistors.
Turing. Enigma. Clocks. Quartz. GHz.
I wasn't studying for anything.
I just couldn't stop.
Then I tried Python.
Everyone said start with Python.
So I did.
But something felt wrong.
I was writing features. Moving data around.
It worked. But it felt... hollow.
Like I was operating a machine I didn't understand.
Then one night I opened a Linux terminal for the first time.
I typed:
uname -r
Output:
6.14.0-37-generic
I didn't know what that number meant.
So I looked it up.
That was the kernel version.
The thing running underneath everything.
I started reading about:
- Init systems
- Boot sequences
- Ring 0 vs Ring 3
- How user space talks to kernel space
- How a simple
open()call travels from your Python script all the way down to hardware
That was the feeling I was looking for.
Six months later.
- Wrote my first kernel module — a character device driver
- Hit a kernel panic on my host machine — not the VM
- Read every log file until I found the root cause
- Filed a bug report on Launchpad
- Ubuntu engineers confirmed it within 2 hours
The bug affected 110+ users.
A single missing file was silently taking down entire boot sequences on NVMe systems — with zero warning to the user.
I found it because I couldn't stop reading logs.
What systems programming actually teaches you.
It's not about features.
It's not about frameworks.
It's about understanding what's actually happening underneath —
when everything looks fine on the surface
but something is quietly broken.
Systems don't just fail loudly.
They fail quietly first.
Learning to see that silence — that's the real skill.
Who I am.
I'm Jill Ravaliya — Linux kernel developer, daily GitHub committer, systems thinker.
I work at Reliance Industries and spend every free hour going deeper into how Linux actually works — not from tutorials, but from breaking things and reading logs until they talk back.
This is where I'll share the deep technical stuff:
- Kernel internals
- Device drivers
- Boot systems
- Real bugs from real machines
If you're wired for systems too — follow along.
Find me here:
What's coming next.
The full investigation of that kernel panic.
Every log.
Every wrong assumption.
Every step that led to the bug.
A silent success path that should never have existed —
and how one missing file nearly made my system permanently unbootable.
See you in the next one.
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