I build things people depend on

I wrote my first program in the 8th grade, in GW-Basic, on a machine that had no business still working. At school I moved on to C and C++: terminal calculators, small text games, and the usual work of a kid who liked making computers do things.

Halfway through my software engineering degree at Virtual University of Pakistan, I decided that waiting until graduation would waste two years. I learned PHP and Laravel from Udemy courses at night. Al-Burraq Technologies in Lahore hired me on November 21, 2016, during my fourth semester. I finished the degree while working full time and graduated with a 3.64 CGPA that nobody has ever asked about since.

Three years at Al-Burraq took me from cutting responsive pages to owning features end to end, and eventually to leading two or three junior developers. Good job, clear ceiling.

So in 2019 I started freelancing on Upwork after work. For about nine months I ran a double shift: agency work by day and freelance clients by night, 12 to 16 hours most days. In April 2019, one of those small jobs became a compliance platform for the US trucking industry. By January 2020 the freelance work had outgrown the job, and I left.

I still work on that platform today, seven years later.

The freelance years taught me how to be an entire engineering department. In 2020 I built two complete SaaS platforms in eight months for one client: Visionerro, a multi-tenant agency platform with a database per tenant, and FlexSited, a self-serve onboarding portal for the beauty industry. I handled the architecture, code, servers, and launches.

In 2022, Confidential client brought me on as its first developer. Its checkout ran on JotForm and PHP scripts. Four years later, it was a four-project Laravel and Vue platform handling 17 clinical encounter types, physician networks, pharmacy fulfillment, identity verification, and 85,000+ orders in 2025. For the first year and a half I was the whole team, including the AWS infrastructure. A team later formed around that foundation.

Remote work is the discipline I have trained hardest. Since 2019 I have worked US hours from Pakistan: awake when my clients are and asleep when my city is. The offset is nine hours. I have not missed a handoff because of it.

I default to writing. Every significant decision with my longest client exists in a written thread. That has helped a seven-year engagement stay calm through migrations, billing changes, and the occasional production fire. It also means the next developer inherits explanations instead of folklore.

I keep systems boring on purpose. I choose Laravel, Vue, and MySQL so one person can still hold the system in their head at 2 a.m. I save the complicated work for places that need it: an allergy-substitution engine, a tenant provisioning pipeline, and a five-guard auth system.

Twenty years into loving this craft and nine into being paid for it, the list still grows. TypeScript is moving from working knowledge toward fluency. Automated testing is shifting from intention to habit. Going deeper on observability than Telescope and log files. screen.io, with its 243 tests, is where I practice that testing habit in public.

I learn by shipping. I did not know telemedicine, DOT compliance, multi-tenancy, or Python desktop apps before a project demanded them. That has held from GW-Basic to 243-test suites.