Four years of showing up

I graduated. Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering, NED University of Engineering and Technology, UIT, Karachi.

Alhamdulillah. I want to say that first, and I want to say it plainly, because everything that follows only makes sense to me in that order. I did not plan most of this well. Things kept opening that I had no business expecting, and I have never been able to explain that to myself as cleverness or hard work alone. God was kind to me in ways I did not earn.

Before university

I had a PC at home, but I did not use it. Using it gave me headaches, so I mostly left it alone. I got my own laptop a few days before university started, and I arrived not really knowing how to use a computer. Plenty of people in my class already moved around a machine with ease. I was starting a few steps behind, in a degree that assumed I was not.

Learning to code

Then I started coding, and something in me went very quiet and very interested at the same time.

It was not that I was good at it. I was slow, I got stuck constantly, and a lot of my early code worked for reasons I could not have defended. But it was the first thing I had met where being stuck was not the end of the road. You could sit with a problem, try the wrong thing, and watch exactly how it was wrong.

So I practised. I solved HackerRank problems, one after another. I found out about hackathons and started entering them. This was before ChatGPT, so when I was stuck I had Stack Overflow and the patience to read answers to questions that were almost, but not quite, mine. That gap, between the answer someone else needed and the answer I needed, is where I think I actually learned to program.

Open source

Open source was the turn I did not see coming.

My first pull request went to Bootstrap. It was a small one, and the project frustrated me at first. But it gave me a lot of confidence. A project that size had looked at something I wrote, and I wanted to do it again.

So I kept going. I opened pull requests on different projects and slowly got better at reading code I had not written. I also kept a list of my own ideas and tried to build them myself, with a lot of help from Stack Overflow. What kept me there was that people replied. Maintainers took time to explain things to a student they had never met and owed nothing.

A rejection, then a yes

In January 2023 I applied to the Linux Foundation’s LFX Mentorship and was rejected. That rejection turned out to be useful: it taught me how to write a good cover letter. I applied again later that year and was selected, and spent the summer improving the Python SDK for Zowe, mentored by an engineer from Broadcom.

After that I understood something about Google Summer of Code: if I wanted in, I had to contribute more. So I did. I worked on different projects, including GraphNeT, a deep-learning framework for neutrino telescopes, and Querypls, my own app that turns questions into SQL.

Before applying, I emailed a professor on the project I wanted to join and told them I wanted to take part. They wrote back that my profile was pretty much what they wanted. I was selected for Google Summer of Code 2024 and built batch simulation workflows for HNN-Core, a neuroscience tool, under INCF, with guidance from people at Brown University who were generous with their time. I wrote about that stretch in the third way I found into Google Summer of Code.

That same year I got to present my open-source work at Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna.

Work

My first job came in 2024, at MetaSensing, as an AI engineer leading the AI team. I started with a proof of concept and then built it out with the team, and I also looked after the go-to-market side with the same group.

Next I joined Radium full time, working on projects for clients like Canon and on internal projects.

After that I joined HeyOz, a marketing and advertising agency, as an AI Product Engineer, building with tools like Mastra for agents, server-sent events for streaming, and Redis for caching. It is also where I started learning system design.

What I learned

None of these felt like a milestone at the time. Each one felt like the next slightly uncomfortable thing I said yes to, usually unsure. The pattern only looks like a path from here.

What I actually learned in four years is smaller than the resume suggests. Showing up repeatedly beats showing up brilliantly. A rejection is information: mine taught me how to apply properly. Being visibly confused in public, in an issue thread or a review, is the fastest way to stop being confused. And the people who helped me had no reason to, which means the only sensible response is to do the same for someone else.

I was not the most prepared person in that room on day one. Not close. I showed up. God opened doors. That is genuinely how it feels to me, and I do not have a more sophisticated version of it.

To my parents, my teachers, my friends, and every maintainer who replied to a nervous student: thank you. Alhamdulillah.