I like building things that actually run.

Not slide decks. Not Figma files. Things with a URL, a database, and someone other than me clicking around in them.

I grew up and studied in Sukkur, Sindh — did my BS in Computer Science at Sukkur IBA University, where my final-year project was a blockchain-based voting system. That project is basically the reason the rest of my career has bent toward blockchain: I got curious about what it actually takes to make a system where "nobody can quietly change the record" isn't a policy, it's a property of the code.

My first real developer job was remote, for three years, at Clear Edge Technology in Canada — mostly Django/Flask and PostgreSQL, plus interactive canvas work with Konva.js. It's where I learned that the boring 20% of a project (migrations, admin panels, deployment, the stuff nobody demos) is usually what determines whether the interesting 80% survives contact with real users.

After that I came back to Sukkur IBA, this time on the other side of the desk — as a Software Development Intern in the Department of Electrical Engineering, running their OJS (Open Journal Systems) installation, the department website, and a pile of office automation nobody else wanted to touch. It's unglamorous work, but it taught me a lot about maintaining systems other people depend on daily, not just shipping new ones.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I got pulled into prompt engineering and applied AI — partly through coursework (DataCamp, Hugging Face), partly by just building things: a Groq-powered chat app and some small ML models. I don't think of AI and blockchain as separate lanes from "normal" web development — they're just more tools for the same underlying job, which is turning a real problem into something that works reliably.

These days I'm freelancing full-time — React and Node.js on the frontend/backend side, Python where data or ML is involved, Solidity when the problem genuinely calls for a blockchain (which, to be clear, is rarer than blockchain Twitter would have you believe). I'd rather ship a smaller thing that's actually deployed than a bigger thing that only exists in a repo.

How I work

Three things I try to hold myself to on every project:

1. Ship something a real user can touch as early as possible.
2. Don't reach for a heavier tool (blockchain, a new microservice, a new framework) than the problem actually needs.
3. Leave the boring parts (docs, deploys, admin) in better shape than I found them.

I write about what I build on my blog, and I recently completed Cyfrin's Foundry Fundamentals course on testing and deploying smart contracts.

Outside of work: I read a fair amount, listen to podcasts on long stretches of nothing-to-do, and play games when I want my brain to stop optimizing anything.