About

I build things, take them apart, and write down what I learned.

I’m a software engineer in Lahore. Before that I spent my university years in makerspaces — running one, being a resident designer in another, and putting a lot of Raspberry Pis inside boxes I cut myself. Then I stopped for a while. Now I’ve started again, in a room in my house, with a pile of dead hardware and no deadline.

This site is where the writing goes. Embedded systems, kernels, machine learning small enough to run on a microcontroller, and the ordinary business of fixing things that don’t work.

You can also find me as brownnerd — YouTube, X, Instagram, Discord.

A timeline

2016

  • Jul — Joined Makeistan, Pakistan’s first academic makerspace, at the Information Technology University of the Punjab. Started as a facilitator.
  • Oct — Founded M-Lab, a makerspace at Forman Christian College.
  • Through to 2018: a long run of IoT controllers, including hakuna-matata — home automation on a Raspberry Pi talking to a NodeMCU ESP8266.

2017

  • Mar — RFID access controller on an ATmega AT89.
  • Jul–Sep — Designer in Residence at Makeistan. Three months of building things that weren’t quite engineering and weren’t quite art.
  • The Water Saving Shower — six weeks, one design partner, a shower head that uses less water per minute and nudges you toward a temperature shift once you’ve been in there too long. Market research done on Brandreth Road. Shown at TEDxITU.
  • A Light That Is Shy — a lamp that would rather you didn’t look at it.
  • How Will You Conduct Yourself In A Company Of Plants — an installation where plants made sound when you interacted with them.
  • Nov — Panoramic image generator in OpenCV, stitching with SIFT and SURF features.

2018

  • Oct 2017 – Jun 2018 — S.E.R.I.C., Smart Embedded Redundant IoT Camera. A facial recognition doorbell running entirely on-board, no cloud. My final year project.
  • Jun — SERIC won Best of Punjab in Embedded Systems at COMPPEC’18, NUST College of EME. Also placed in the top hundred internationally at the Kazan OIC Entrepreneurship Boot-camp, and was pitched at the Telenor Velocity IoT Hackathon.
  • Graduated with a BS in Computer Science from Forman Christian College.
  • Tried to turn SERIC into a company. Got seriously ill instead.

2019–2020

  • Mar 2019 – Nov 2020 — Ran Maker Baithak, a gathering for people who make things. Invited guests, an audience that kept coming back, and a lot of conversations that had nothing to do with my day job.

2023

  • Started a YouTube channel explaining computer science and programming in Urdu. Made a few videos. Stopped.

2026

  • Started again. Built a lab at home — a rack of old ThinkPads, a NAS full of firmware, and a queue of broken devices. Working through kernel programming, embedded systems, and on-device machine learning, in that order.
  • Writing it all down here.

If you want to talk about any of it, my email is on every page.