The Night Algorithm and I Went Back in Time

Sunday, December 21, 2025

I couldn’t sleep last night. Instead of fighting it, I did what everyone does: I grabbed my phone, opened YouTube, and started looking for some instrumentals just to quiet my brain down. What happened next was pretty wild, though I guess it’s common now. YouTube did its thing and started digging. Slowly, my feed shifted from “relaxing beats” to stuff I hadn’t heard in years. One click led to another, and suddenly I was deep in a rabbit hole of my own past. It’s crazy how these algorithms don’t just track what you like—they track who you were. I ended up sitting there in the dark, rediscovering tracks I used to have on repeat, each one bringing back a specific memory I’d totally forgotten about. …

Debian on Old Hardware

Saturday, December 20, 2025

I recently revived an old laptop with an Intel i3, 4 GB RAM, and a standard disk drive by installing Debian. The motivation was simple: Windows had become unbearably slow on this machine, and I wanted to see how a modern Linux distribution would perform on limited hardware. From Windows to Xubuntu—and Beyond Initially, I replaced Windows with Xubuntu. The experience did improve, but not enough for my son to actually start using the laptop. After checking the hardware, I found that upgrading the RAM to 8 GB and replacing the hard drive with an SSD would cost under PKR 10,000. That seemed reasonable. …

From Madina to Margallas: A Coffee Contemplation in Karachi

Saturday, December 13, 2025

Back in 2011, on a journey from Madina to Mecca, I had a sensory experience that stuck with me. After the last prayer, someone was distributing “chai” and “khawa.” I asked for khawa. I am not a coffee fanatic per se, but that specific taste stayed with me the whole journey. I know enough to distinguish instant granules from freshly ground beans, but that cup was something else. Now, as we enter the few fleeting months in Karachi where the weather allows us to enjoy coffee without worrying about the heat, I’ve started reading God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest For the Perfect Coffee by Michaele Weissman. It was part of a Humble Bundle I bought ages ago—I don’t even remember what the bundle was for—but the book sat in my library waiting for this specific winter. …

If You Are Like Me

Friday, November 28, 2025

If you are human, it’s natural to dream big to plan out each day, each year, and then regret it all when New Year’s resolutions arrive. We’ve all been there. But this constant cycle of planning, failing, regretting, and planning again can slowly drift you into a zone that affects your psychological well-being. It’s not healthy. A quiet, steady life can also be a meaningful one. One of the first “gems” I ever received came from my khala, my maternal aunt. She would say: …

My Religion Story

Saturday, March 15, 2025

Let me take you down memory lane and share some observations. From birth until now, I have lived in three different localities, progressing from a neglected neighborhood to a somewhat clean one, and finally to a relatively safe and maintained area. Interestingly, in comparison, the neglected locality from 35 years ago was at that time safer than the “relatively safe” one today. You might be wondering why I am talking about localities in Karachi when the title is about religion. My observation is that the majority of people follow the religion of their family, which is expected. However, the specific variant of religion they adhere to often depends on the Masjid they goto—unless they have a strict version handed down from their family. This has been the case with my own religious journey, I will discount the first locality because i did not go to the Masjid except for some lessons, which were specifically for reading Quran. The 2nd Masjid were of Deobandi and the 3rd is of Tanzeem e Islami, they too are predominately Deobandi but quite liberal in excepting other schools especially Ahl-i Hadith and Barelvi. But they are openly critical of things which they do not agree with like asking for help for anyone other then Allah, or using weak Hadith for preaching, in fact they argue that peaching should be done with Quran as a base. …

Navigating Ramzan

Saturday, March 1, 2025

When navigating home, it’s a good practice to check which routes are open or simply set your home as the destination and let the phone do the rest. Initially, I thought GPS worked with the phone network—but I was wrong. However, to have fully functional navigation, you need map data. This realization came when I was looking for a GPS device for my bicycle on AliExpress and noticed that they didn’t have SIM slots. Later, I stopped cycling and never bought the device. However, I did buy a Mi Band, and it served me well. Nowadays, every weekend, I plan to start walking and going to the gym again but lack the motivation. At least I have the sense not to buy gear before changing my lifestyle—though some days, I do check Garmin’s website to see what’s on offer. …

Cricket Feburary 2025

Sunday, February 23, 2025

My wife asked to check when the match would start. I googled and found that 2 overs were already up, and there was a “Watch it Live” button! It took me to a Pakistani streaming service. I had already heard its name but didn’t know what else they offered. Unfortunately, other than the match, everything was buffering and losing quality. They probably dedicated all the resources they had to the match, which makes sense, and I am not much of an entertainment consumer anyway. Normally my feed consists of technical YouTube channels. I think the last thing I watched on Netflix was Money Heist, and that too was because my wife was addicted to it. I used to peek between scenes and had to figure out the whole sequence. …

Coding in 2025

Saturday, February 15, 2025

This post is for students who like programming but are uncertain of its future. I am not very good with arguments, but I have been in this business since 2000 and people often ask me about what the future holds, no one can know what that will be but we can speculate with past experiences. So, this is my take on programming in 2025, let me know in the comments what you think. …

Pulse

Saturday, February 8, 2025

In the rhythm of life, sometimes we need to pause and check our pulse - to see how far we’ve come and how much has changed. Today serves as one of those moments of reflection. Earlier today, I helped a colleague set up a blog. While WordPress seemed like the obvious choice, we opted for Hugo - a simpler solution that matched their comfort level. This interaction sparked memories of my own blogging journey, reminding me how our choices evolve with time. …

Staying at Home

Sunday, April 26, 2020

We’ve been under lockdown from 20th March here in Karachi, went to the office on 20th that is, it was Friday, also the last day I went to Masjid. Was in office due to a pending “high priority issue” which was on someone else’s plate, but he had to run back home to interior Sindh amid lockdown risk. From then on till now it is all work from home and our team has adopted it well. …