Passionate Software Architect, Entrepreneur, and Coffee Enthusiast
Every serious AI coding setup has a hidden layer underneath the model. It’s not the model. It’s not the IDE plugin. It’s the infrastructure that decides what the model knows when it starts, what it remembers while it works, and what survives after it stops.
I spent two years prompting LLMs before I found DSPy.
There’s a moment every developer has felt. You give an AI a task. It comes back confident, producing code that almost works. The logic is plausible. The syntax is clean. And then you realize it invented a function that doesn’t exist, picked the wrong library, or quietly changed a data model three files away from where you were looking.
I wrote about phntm.sh a few weeks ago. The short version: a file sharing tool that encrypts in your browser, puts the key in the URL fragment, and forgets the ciphertext when the timer runs out. I literally cannot read your file.
A few months ago I wrote that we gave up file ownership without noticing. That we handed control to corporations not because it was better, but because it was easier. I ended with “we can build something better.”
I’ve been vibe coding for the better part of a year. You know the drill. Open Cursor or Claude Code, type something like “build me a login screen with Google auth,” and hope for the best. Sometimes it works great. Sometimes the AI hallucinates a library that doesn’t exist, picks a routing strategy you hate, or quietly breaks something three files away.
I built a multi-agent system because I could. Not because the world needs another coding assistant. We have Cursor, VS Code with Copilot, Windsurf, Replit Agent, Lovable. They all do this better than what I made.
There was a time when we controlled our data. You didn’t need permission from a company to send someone a file. You didn’t need an account. You didn’t need to agree to anything. You just shared it. One computer talked to another. That was enough.
Sometimes I hate the fact that I was born in Pakistan… well, not sometimes, just whenever my visa gets rejected for no clear reason.
Ever watched someone solve a tough problem while pacing, scribbling half-sentences, muttering “carry the two…” under their breath? That’s how we humans reason. We don’t narrate full essays in our heads. We sketch ideas. And that’s exactly the vibe of Chain of Draft (CoD).
I’ve launched All Things Devcast, my new podcast diving deep into the world of artificial intelligence and software development. This podcast aims to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI technology and practical implementation in the developer’s world.
One of the coolest things I learned in 2024 was DSPy 1. It’s a framework for programming LLMs (not prompting). It’s a great way to build LLM applications.
Writing Python code is easy, but writing Pythonic code? That’s an art! Let’s explore some Python best practices that will level up your coding game. We’ll use these emojis to rate different code approaches:
Recently, I was presented with an intriguing challenge by a client. They were using a tablet-based point of sale (POS) system to sell memberships. The process involved a salesperson entering the buyer’s information and then having the buyer provide their signature after verifying all the details. However, once the contract was generated, it frequently failed validation because the details entered…
I have a deep love for Markdown .It’s the magical tool that turns plain text into beautifully formatted documents. But here’s a little secret: even with over 10 years in tech, I still find myself googling how to format Markdown. So, I decided to write this cheatsheet to end my relentless web searches
I’ve been quietly working on a personal challenge: 100 days of AI. As part of this journey, I built a chatbot that lets you chat with a PDF file. Using GPT-4 and the Assistants API, my bot can help you interact with the content of any PDF you upload.
The Inspiration Spark Picture this: I’m on a flight to Karachi, a megacity I’ve always felt a connection to, when it hits me. The sheer scale of the place, the energy – there had to be a better way to navigate it than generic travel guides. Enter Karachi Chal, my AI-powered itinerary planner! Sometimes, even when you think you’re escaping work to clear your head, inspiration strikes in the most…
I recently launched Zenpad, inspired by my search for a distraction-free writing tool that’s straightforward yet powerful. Despite trying various platforms, I found them lacking in simplicity, prompting me to create Zenpad. Designed for writers who value focus, it requires no sign-up or sign-in, embodying the essence of minimalism.
Like a RKO out of nowwhere, OpenAI has unveiled Sora, a AI model designed to transform text instructions into realistic and imaginative video scenes. This launch marks a significant milestone in AI’s capability to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, opening up unprecedented possibilities for creators across the globe.
I found out about crew ai some time ago. While the use of multiple AT agents to perform a task is not something new. Crew AI serves as a framework to make this a lot more easier. The best part is that it lets you define your agents and their tasks in a very organized manner. I have been playing with it for a while now and I did a small experiment to see if I could use it to detect fake news.
A long time ago I was part of a competition where people were presenting and building some great ideas. One such startup that really inspired me was trying to build an app to recognize ASL(American Sign Language) and PSL(Pakistan Sign Language). To no one’s surprise they won the competion, however down the line 4 years from that day, that startup now works as a event management company and…
While experimenting with building my own GPTs, I stumbled upon a fascinating idea. What if we could train a GPT on code and utilize it to roast code? Intrigued by the concept, I decided to give it a shot. As a result Roasty was born. Roasty is a fiesty little GPT that roasts your code (and you). While its a novel idea, its the prompt that matters and the results. So far Roasty has roasted my code…
Recently, I had a small argument with a colleague who suggested that one of our developers should determine whether a request failed or succeeded based on the returned string—specifically, whether it was empty or not. While this might seem like a straightforward approach, I strongly believe that decisions should be based on HTTP status codes, not the content of the response string. Here’s why.
This year marked the 10th anniversary of the Code for All, a premier gathering for civic tech enthusiasts worldwide. The summit provided a unique platform to discuss, explore, and evaluate the impact of civic tech on a global scale. I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion on open-source technology and delivering a lightning talk on one of our community efforts, “Flood Light.”
In the grand tradition of friendly banter among developers, I embarked on a journey to create a tool that could generate light-hearted, non-offensive insults for programmers. Why, you ask? Well, because who doesn’t love a good-natured jest about their favorite (or not-so-favorite) programming language? And thus, insults.dev was born.
If you are like me and need a quick way to spin up a PostgreSQL instance with PG admin, here is a docker compose file that you can use to do that.
I recently tweeted a thread about this but just in case adding them all here as well.
I have worked with docker for over 7 years now and I still get confused about the difference between environment variables and arguments. In this post I try to simplify the distinction and explain when to use what.
Rediscovering iOS Development: From Objective-C to SwiftUI I ws a iOS developer in a past life who started his career more than eight years ago, I have seen firsthand the remarkable evolution of the iOS ecosystem. Back in the day, Objective-C was the go-to language for developing iOS applications, and we had to deal with manual memory management without the luxury of Automatic Reference Counting…
I am working on something very cool these days. I am not ready to make it public yet but I can tell you that it’s a fintech app. And it’s going to be awesome!
Vue 3 has some cool new features, including “inject” and “provide”, which allow you to share data between parent and child components without having to pass it down as props. This makes your components more modular and reusable.
Position: Mean Stack Developer (Full-time)
I came across this really interesting experiment by A.E Studio. They have taken this initiative to launch a tool every day. Most of us who build Saas for a living understand the importance of skunkworks software. Check out their intiative Same Day Skunk Works. Maybe you will find the motivation to build that Saas you have been thinking about for a while.
I have loved the ethereum ecosystem ever since its inception. Sadly I have not yet gottent the opportunity to do any mainstream project on it other than some code labs for practice. We are living in wonderful times, we have witnessed a true transiton in the that breaks a monopoly and makes the system more fair. Allow me to explain in a few lines.
Docker is a containerization platform that allows us to deploy our applications inside a container and then we can easily ship that container anywhere.
Pakistan has been hit by the worst flood ever this year. At the time of writing this post, the flood affected a total of over 1.5 million people. Here are a few stats:
Photo by CDC on Unsplash
Happy 2020 Too! If you stubmled across this post searching for how to run your uber cool angular app using docker, you are at the right place. Lets start at the begining. This is how you would normally create a new angular app:
You just built your uber cool jekyll site. You just deployed it on your server. Whats this?! No RSS Feeds! Don’t sweat, I got you. See its pretty simple. you just have to do two things.
I am planning to make a fund to help engineers like me who can afford an Xbox but are not being allowed to buy one. You can help this glorious purpose by taking a simple poll:
While searching for something entirely different we came across a discussion on quora that prompted us to think, why can’t any of us remember our national anthem?
So Recently at Code for Pakistan our VP Tech. made it abundantly clear that we ought to watch Uncle Bob’s clean code video lectures. It’s a really good series of videos that make you think about the code you write everyday.
Have you ever wondered what you can do more for your city? Are you a developer with some really good software skills? Do you hunger to solve problems that a common citizen faces?
Some unique and exciting circumstances require us to redeploy gov.uk for a government stakeholder. If I am honest, this seems like a huge undertaking. As cool as this sounds, the whole project scares me. I mean, look at this architecture diagram:
I’ve been getting into time-series databases over the past few months. I got into playing with TimescaleDB and was super impressed with its capabilities. One of the important things to understand is that TimescaleDB is just Postgres at its core which means technically TimescaleDB is an extension. Following is my usual MO to quickly run an instance of TimescaleDB.