What I am working on right now

Building

The rebuild of devbatch.com is the largest single thing on my desk this quarter. The site has not been seriously rewritten since the company started, and the rebuild is the first time we are putting the work we are actually good at on the front page. Alongside it, the healthcare-enterprise vertical is opening conversations with US hospital groups for the first time. I am also writing more on this site than I have written publicly in years; this whole property is part of what I am building this year.

Reading

I am re-reading parts of The Hard Thing About Hard Things alongside Roy Bahat’s recent writing on services-business compounding. I am also reading more Urdu non-fiction this year than I have in a decade. The right book in the right language hits a different muscle. On the religious side, I am working through tafsir of Surah Kahf again; I read the first ten and last ten ayats every Friday morning, and the cycle through the rest is slow on purpose.

Thinking about

Whether AI is going to compress the unit economics of engineering services delivery faster than the industry expects, and what the 2026 version of “ship a six-person team in eleven days” looks like when half the work that team would have done is now done by a model. I do not have a clean answer. I have a working hypothesis I will write up later this quarter.

I am also thinking about the Shafiq Foundation. The structure has been informal for years. I am working toward making it formal enough that the work continues after I am gone, which is the entire point of sadqa-e-jaria. The piece I have not solved is the mental-health pillar; Pakistani society needs an institutional response to peer-and-jadu-tona pseudo-medicine, and I do not yet know who the right partners are.

Praying for

Stable health for my parents. A productive Ramadan in 2027 for my family. The Pakistani engineers I have employed for sixteen years, and the country that produced them. An umrah this year with my parents, in shaa Allah.