Noticing when a person is doing a machine’s job.

I was born in the United States, grew up in Pakistan, and came back at eighteen with a plan somebody else had made for me: start at a two-year school. Wilbur Wright College was the one I landed at, nowhere near where I lived, more or less by accident. A conversation in a physics class put me onto its engineering pathway, which guarantees a transfer if you hold your grades. Two and a half years later I went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a cohort of friends.

Along the way I became the first computer science tutor the college had, teaching calculus, physics, chemistry and two semesters of C. That is how Dr. Espiritu found me, and how I ended up on her research into matching mentors with mentees: students who had already transferred, paired with students still trying to. The interesting part was deciding what a good pairing even is. Close enough to have something in common, different enough that one of them has something to teach.

I paid for all of it out of pocket. Gas stations, busboy shifts, cleaning toilets, tutoring, lab assistant work, and a few hundred projects built in whatever was left of the evening.

Full Stack Engineer at FYCLabs. I emailed their COO while I was still in school, explaining who I was and why I wanted to work there, and started three days after I finished. I moved to Austin for the tech sector and it has been the right call. The work is sitting with a client, finding the step a person is doing by hand, and building whatever removes it: sometimes product, sometimes the systems underneath. The experience page has the roles in detail, and the projects are the work I set myself.

Outside it I buy broken hardware and fix it. A lot I picked up last spring came with four Bambu Lab printers, which is how I ended up running a small printing business on Etsy without ever deciding to. Most of what that taught me was unglamorous: filament absorbs moisture and has to be dried, the wrong material fails in ways you only learn by failing, and a printer that jams at hour nine costs you the whole print. AMS-X came out of the most repetitive part of it. Four spools is a hardware answer to a software problem.

I also watch an unreasonable amount of financial reality television.