I'm Ishaq 👋🏽

A software engineer who finds joy in learning and building.

Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2019 from the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Islamabad.

During my undergraduate degree, I took a course on Introduction to Programming and ever since then, I kinda knew I was in the wrong degree. However, instead of changing course, I fostered my love for programming and building software as a hobby.

I also took every chance I got to use coding for some of my course projects - I built a speech detection system that controlled utilities like lights and fans for my electronics class, and my final year project was a soft robotic prosthetic hand that was operated via an Arduino board that I programmed (P.S. I also presented about this project in Athens, Greece, as part of the IET Present Around The World competition).

After graduating in 2019, I worked as a process engineer for some time at Procter & Gamble's Port Qasim plant in Karachi. During this time, I took online courses from Coursera and Udemy to learn data science, machine learning, and web development.

Around mid-2021, I decided to take a leap of faith. Armed with knowledge from a few online courses and a personal project that was a MERN-stack app, I started applying for software engineering roles via LinkedIn.

To my surprise, I got several entry-level offers from local software agencies and I formally entered the software industry in September of 2021, working as a full-stack developer at an agency building React Native apps.

Two months later, I moved to Teamo and started working remotely with a foreign client, building applications in the e-commerce domain using providers like Shopify Plus and commercetools and technologies like Typescript, React, and Nextjs. During this period, I've had the opportunity to grow rapidly as a software engineer and work on a series of projects, each more complex than the last.

In all this, I've still continued to code on the side and build projects aimed at solving personal pain points. I've built stuff like:

  • New React Component Boilerplate - a VS Code extension with 200+ installs that helped me automate the creation of new react components for some of my nextjs + typescript projects
  • Share ChatGPT Chat - A chrome extension I built in the early days of chatGPT to make it easy to share my chats publicly via share-able links. (Of course openAI released this as a feature itself so this is now lost in limbo)

Right now I'm working on Yet Another Finance App, an app that leverages the power of LLMs to eliminate the friction I face in tracking my everyday expenses and managing my personal finances in general. I'm hoping to share my experience of building this in public.

I'm also quite grateful for open-source projects and communities that push for open-source, and I want to one day be an active contributor to an impactful project. I've taken some baby steps in that direction, with a contribution to Nextjs that fixed a bug in one of its codemods.

If you found my journey interesting and want to chat tech (or anything else really) with me, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn!