About
Afa' is a personal engineering notebook about software, systems, infrastructure and AI.
Afa'
Code, Systems & AI
Afa' is a Yemba word meaning work — the things we make, build, experiment with, and learn from.
That idea is at the heart of this blog.
Afa' is my personal engineering notebook: a place where I document things I build, problems I solve, ideas I explore, and lessons I learn along the way.
About me
I'm Sébastien Demanou.
I'm a software engineer interested in the space where software, systems and infrastructure meet. Over the years, I've worked with Linux, networking, containers, automation, developer tooling and, more recently, AI and local models.
I enjoy understanding how things work, building them from the ground up, automating repetitive work, and writing things down once I've figured them out.
This blog is an extension of that habit.
Why Afa'?
The name comes from Yemba, a language spoken in the Menoua region of Cameroon.
Afa' means work.
I chose it because it captures something simple: engineering is ultimately about making things.
Writing code, designing a system, debugging a difficult problem, deploying infrastructure, experimenting with a new model — they are all forms of afa'.
The name is also a small connection to my Cameroonian roots. Rather than choosing a generic technical name, I wanted the blog to carry a little piece of where I come from.
A long-running notebook
Afa' is not the beginning of my habit of writing about technology. It is the latest chapter.
I published my first technical posts on WordPress in 2012, on a blog called MemoInfo. I continued writing there until 2014.
After a few years away from blogging, I started publishing again in 2018, this time using GitLab Snippets as my notebook and publishing platform.
What started as a convenient way to keep commands, configurations, scripts and technical notes gradually became a kind of blog of its own.
Afa' brings those different periods together.
The archive therefore goes back to 2012, with the original publication dates preserved wherever possible:
2012–2014 · WordPress MemoInfo — the beginning
2018–2026 · GitLab Snippets Notes, experiments and practical solutions
2026– · Afa' Code, Systems & AI
The older material has been migrated rather than rewritten simply for the sake of having a clean timeline. Keeping the original dates matters: technical knowledge changes, tools evolve, and old posts are also a record of how I approached problems at a particular point in time.
What's here?
The writing is deliberately practical: commands, configuration, small scripts, architecture notes, experiments, and the reasoning behind them.
Recurring themes include:
- software development and developer tooling
- Linux and the command line
- containers, infrastructure and DevOps
- networking and security
- AI, local models and experimentation
- systems engineering and automation
Some posts are polished tutorials. Others are simply notes from something I had to figure out. Both have their place.
A living notebook
Afa' isn't intended to be a publication or a news site.
It's a living notebook — a record of things I've learned and built over time.
Some notes will become obsolete. Some will remain useful for years. Others may serve mostly as a reminder of how I approached a problem at a particular point in time.
That's part of the value of keeping the archive.
The goal is simple:
Build things. Understand them. Write them down.
There is no tracking, no comments platform and no newsletter. Just a static notebook that is fast to read, easy to search, and pleasant to come back to.