Who am I

I am a Software Developer originally from Karachi, Pakistan having dabbled with computers since around 1996. My first computer was an Intel 386 with a math co-processor running at 16 MHz with a turbo boost button for the blazing fast clock speed of 24 MHz. My second PC was a 486-DX2 that allowed me to play all the flight simulators I loved without long load times, crashes and glitches. The Sound Blaster 16 sound card helped make the immersion all the better though getting the dip switches for the IRQ, DMA and IO settings took a few tries to get right. Later I would harness the unthinkable power of a dedicated graphics card; the Riva TNT 2, followed shortly by the 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000.

My first interaction with the “Internet” was courtesy the United Nations Sustainable Development Program (UNDP, SDNPK and IUCN being the operative acronyms) providing dial up email services. With access to their forums/usenet groups, I was able to download the binaries for a Bulletin Board System (BBS) using my first ever UNIX command (uucp). I ran PCBoard and later Wildcat BBS for several years, with a handful of regular users growing organically through word of mouth alone.

Playing flight simulator multiplayer on peer-to-peer dialup was fun. It eventually gave me something to think about; how did these MS-DOS .EXE and .COM files with their cryptic binary - which I stared at at length using the edit command - allow something as complex as a Flight Simulator to exist? Knowledge was hard to come by, and by luck I fell upon a few good books on C++ and UNIX.

I managed to grab a copy of Borland Turbo C++ IDE (no small feat in those days) and began a series of increasingly complex applications, which crescendoed with an MS-DOS Terminate-and-Stay-Resident (TSR) application hand written in x86 assembly that attached to the Print-Screen interrupt to directly modify the terminal video buffer. I would later run my own Web Hosting company managing co-located Linux and FreeBSD servers, while running Slackware at home.

After school and college, I joined a series of mobile app and game development startups, eventually moving away from front-end development after the release of the iPhone 3GS as the dedicated graphics chip obviated the need for well written and efficient code. I began to focus more on back-end technologies and understanding low-level concurrency primitives (epoll, kqueue) and higher order application layer patterns. Eventually I grabbed the first opportunity to move out of Pakistan with a job offer from Amazon where I began work in 2014.

After spending nine years at Amazon, I founded and worked at a series of small startups with a mix of leading teams and managing complexity. I currently work as the VP of Engineering at a healthcare startup that looks to leverage LLMs to improve patient outcomes for post-acute woundcare providers by augmenting their charting and billing experience.

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