About

i’m a software engineer. fifteen years in — long enough to have opinions, short enough that most of them are still provisional. self-taught, which means the curriculum was whatever i was obsessed with at the time.

for a while that was hacking. watched every movie, ran every script i could find, celebrated whenever i stumbled across an sql injection in the wild. classic script kiddie. at some point i realized the people i actually wanted to be were programmers first — that the hacking was downstream of that. so i learned to code. the first time i asked a computer to do something and it did exactly that, something shifted. that was the moment. i’ve been chasing it since.

i’ve done most of it. html and css in the psd-to-html era, wordpress, php, then node. web apps, mobile apps, backends. led teams. iot, big data pipelines, dashboards, business process automation, bpmn engines. computer vision for threat detection. generalist — i go wherever the interesting problems are. i call myself a jack of all trades without apology; breadth is its own kind of depth when you’ve actually shipped all of it.

most of that eventually converged on one thing: systems that deal in behavioral signals. what people click, when, in what sequence, and whether that sequence is real. for the past several years this has been specifically ad fraud. the adversary is well-funded, adaptive, and often indistinguishable from legitimate traffic until you’re looking at exactly the right thing. detecting automated behavior and modeling human behavior turn out to be the same problem.

i live in islamabad. grew up in gujranwala, moved through a few cities before settling here. the city is uneven, some parts genuinely beautiful, and it’s been home long enough that moving feels like a hypothetical.

i have children. this changes the texture of most problems.

outside of work i spend time on things without deliverables. urdu poetry has been a long thread — ghalib and mir for the difficulty, faiz for the politics, bulleh shah because he seems to have actually arrived somewhere. ibn arabi’s metaphysics is a recent obsession; the fusus al-hikam rewards rereading, though it punishes careless reading severely. i have opinions about capitalism, rights, and what a free society actually requires. i write about these occasionally, not systematically.