A Self Reflection

Every person has a story that begins long before they are born.

Mine began with two families who lived completely different lives.

My mother's family belonged to Lahore, Pakistan. They were city people. Life was never luxurious, but it was stable enough to dream. They were what you could call a lower-middle-class family. Money was always something to think about, but education was valued more than comfort. My mother grew up believing that if life did not give you opportunities, you had to create them yourself.

While studying for her higher education, she started teaching in a school to support herself and help her family financially. She was young, hardworking, and determined. Teaching was not just a job for her. It became a part of who she was.

My father's world was very different.

His family belonged to a small village near Faisalabad, Pakistan. Compared to my mother's side, they had far fewer opportunities. They were extremely poor. Every small achievement carried weight because nothing came easily.

Like many young men who wanted a better future, my father left his village and came to Lahore. He lived with his uncle's family while continuing his education. He completed his bachelor's degree, then his master's degree, and later an MBA. Alongside his studies, he searched for work wherever he could. Eventually, he found a small job in Lahore.

His salary was modest. It was not enough to call him successful, but compared to what his family had known for generations, it was a significant step forward. For the first time, someone from the family was building a life outside the village through education.

People often ask how my parents met.

The answer usually surprises them.

My parents didn't fall in love. There was no story to tell about how they met, because they never met. Their families found each other while looking for suitable matches; a few meetings happened between the elders, and the marriage was arranged and finalized. Two strangers agreed to trust their parents' judgment and build a life together.

After their marriage, they rented a small apartment in Lahore.

It was not a big house.

It was not beautifully furnished.

It was simply a place they could call home.

Both of them continued working because they had no other choice. Every month was carefully planned. Every expense mattered. They were not building wealth. They were building stability.

Then, on the 6th of March, 2006, I entered their lives. I was their first child.

Looking back now, I realize that I was born into a family that possessed something much more valuable than money. I was born into love.

Although my parents were still at the beginning of their careers and earned only enough to live a modest life, everyone in both families celebrated my arrival as if something extraordinary had happened.

I was the first grandchild for many of them. The first nephew. The first source of excitement after years of ordinary life. Whenever my parents planned to visit relatives, people would become excited before we even arrived.

"Hamza is coming."

Those three words were enough to brighten the atmosphere.

Everyone wanted to hold me. Everyone wanted to play with me. Everyone wanted me sitting beside them.

As a child, I never understood how fortunate I was. Only years later did I realize that not every child grows up surrounded by so many people who are genuinely happy just because they exist.

My parents worked every day, yet somehow they always found time to make me feel like the center of their world.

Some of my earliest memories are not of toys or birthdays.

They are of crying.

Every morning, my mother would get me ready for nursery.

My nursery was a small local school near our home. It was not one of those famous schools with huge buildings or beautiful playgrounds. It was simple and small. The principal knew my parents very well. His three daughters were students of my mother, so our families already shared a respectful relationship. Maybe that is why I never felt like I was just another student there.

Every morning my mother would bring me to school. And every single morning...

I cried.

I never understood why she had to leave. As soon as she turned around to go back, tears would begin rolling down my face. The principal already knew what was about to happen. Before I could cry any louder, he would pick me up in his arms. He never scolded me. He never told me to stop crying. Instead, he carried me towards the school canteen. There he would buy me a packet of chips, biscuits, or some small snack. Almost magically, the tears disappeared. I forget everything. Even the fact that my mother had just left.

The teachers treated me exactly the same way. Sometimes they would carry me around the school. Sometimes they would play with me during breaks. Sometimes they would simply sit beside me and make me laugh. I was surrounded by people who genuinely cared. School never felt like an institution. It felt like another home. The classrooms were filled with colors. The walls were covered with charts and drawings. Children laughed over the smallest things. We did not worry about marks. We did not compete with one another. Our biggest achievement was learning a new letter or counting a little further than yesterday.

Now, when I reflect back, Life was beautifully simple.

Every afternoon, school would finish.

And every afternoon, there she was.

My mother.

Waiting outside.

Sometimes the sun in Lahore was so strong that she would carry an umbrella. She would lift me into her arms as though I weighed nothing. My school bag would hang behind her shoulder while I rested against her. I never thought about how tired she must have been. She had already spent the whole day teaching. She still had household work waiting for her. She still had responsibilities that I knew nothing about. Yet every afternoon, she smiled as if picking me up from school was the happiest part of her day.

Children rarely understand the sacrifices of their parents. Neither did I.

Elementary school was probably one of the happiest phases of my childhood. Looking back, I think those were the years when I truly started discovering who I was.

I was not just another student in the classroom. I was one of the brightest students in my class, and the biggest reason behind that was my mother. Since she was a teacher herself, she never taught me through memorization. She had her own way of making things interesting. Every difficult concept became a story, every lesson became a game, and learning never felt like a burden. It felt like exploring something new.

Many times, before my teachers even introduced a topic in class, I had already learned it at home. Whenever a question was asked, my hand was usually the first one to go up, and most of the time I already knew the answer. Slowly, my teachers started recognizing me. They encouraged me to participate in competitions, trusted me with difficult questions, and pushed me to do more.

Every achievement gave me confidence, and that confidence made me work even harder.

School never felt like a place I had to go. It felt like a place where I belonged.

One of my favorite memories from those years was coming home covered in stars. Our teachers used to draw little stars on our faces, hands, or notebooks whenever we performed well. I would proudly show them to my mother, but she never treated them as trophies. She never told me I was better than others. She always reminded me that the real competition was with myself.

She taught me to become better than who I was yesterday.

But academics were only one part of my childhood. Outside the classroom, I had a whole different world inside my head.

I loved drawing. Not because anyone asked me to, but because I genuinely enjoyed it. A blank page was never just a blank page for me. It was a place where I could bring my imagination to life. While other children drew simple houses and smiling suns, I would spend hours adding details, thinking about shapes, shadows, and small things that made drawings feel real.

My teachers appreciated my artwork, and sometimes my classmates would gather around my desk just to watch me draw. Art never felt like work. It felt natural.

The same thing happened with crafts. Give me some paper, glue, scissors, and colors, and I could spend hours creating something without even realizing how much time had passed. I never needed expensive toys to keep myself entertained. My imagination was enough.

I was curious about almost everything. English, mathematics, general knowledge, and science all felt exciting because they answered questions I already had in my mind. Science especially felt different. It was not just a subject. It was a collection of mysteries waiting to be explored.

At that time, I did not realize what was happening, but something important was growing inside me. I was developing curiosity. I was learning to ask why. I was learning to imagine things that did not exist yet.

Looking back, I don't think the biggest achievement of those years was my grades, my A-pluses, or the stars on my notebooks. Those things eventually became memories. The thing that stayed with me was the way I started thinking.

I became someone who enjoyed creating more than memorizing. Someone who found excitement in turning ideas into reality.

If there was one thing that defined my childhood more than grades or report cards, it was curiosity.

I was never satisfied with simply knowing that something worked. I wanted to understand why it worked, how someone had thought of it in the first place, and whether I could build something similar myself.

We were never a wealthy family. We were an ordinary middle-class family trying to manage things carefully. We did not own a car, expensive toys were never something we casually bought, and every month came with a budget. As a child, I never really complained. Not because I fully understood our financial situation, but because my parents taught me to appreciate what I already had.

The only money I regularly received was lunch money. On days when my mother was too busy to prepare my lunch box before leaving for school, she would hand me a few rupees (PKR) and tell me to buy something during the break.

But instead of spending it on chips, chocolates, or cold drinks like most children did, I started saving it.

At first, it was just a few rupees. Then a little more. Slowly, those small amounts became enough for something I actually wanted.

Not food.

Tools.

Near my school was a small hardware shop. To most people, it was just another shop filled with electrical items and repair equipment. To me, it felt like a place full of possibilities.

I could spend hours looking at the shelves filled with wires, switches, batteries, motors, LEDs, screws, and tools I had only seen in pictures. Whenever I saved enough money, I would buy something new. A screwdriver one month. A glue gun another. Some wires, switches, or small motors after that.

Eventually, I bought my first soldering iron.

I was only eleven years old, and honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that this strange hot tool could connect wires together, and that was enough to make me excited.

Of course, my experiments were far from perfect.

I burnt clothes. I damaged furniture. I left marks around the house. I melted things that were never supposed to be melted. My mother had every reason to be angry, and she often was.

But after some time, she understood that this was not just a phase. This was simply how I saw the world.

Whenever I received a new toy, I was different from most children. I would play with it for a few days, and then my curiosity would take over.

I wanted to know what was inside.

I would carefully remove the screws, separate the gears, study the wires, and examine the tiny motors hidden inside. I was not trying to destroy the toy. I was trying to understand the thinking behind it.

Someone had imagined that object.

Someone had designed it.

Someone had built it.

And I wanted to know if I could do the same.

Sometimes I succeeded.

Most of the time, I failed.

But failure never bothered me. Every broken motor taught me something. Every mistake showed me a new problem to solve. Slowly, I started learning the way engineers learn, by building, breaking, understanding, and trying again.

My room slowly transformed into what looked like a complete mess to everyone else.

Cardboard pieces.

Old speakers.

Broken toys.

Small motors.

Batteries.

Screws.

Wires everywhere.

But to me, it was a laboratory.

Nothing there was useless. Everything had a possibility hidden inside it. A broken object was not the end of its story. It was simply waiting for someone to see what it could become.

I built whatever I could with whatever I had. Some projects worked. Some barely worked. Some failed so badly that even I had to laugh.

But every single one taught me something.

At school, people knew me as the boy who could draw. At home, I was becoming the boy who wanted to build.

Without realizing it, I was learning something that no textbook had ever explained to me:

Engineering was not about getting everything right the first time.

It was about making mistakes, understanding them, and improving.

Looking back now, those afternoons taught me more than many chapters in my textbooks ever did. Nobody gave me a roadmap. Nobody taught me electronics. Nobody handed me expensive equipment.

I only had curiosity, a little pocket money, and the willingness to take apart perfectly good things just to understand them.

That was my education.

At that time, I had no idea where that curiosity would take me. I did not know words like robotics, entrepreneurship, product design, or artificial intelligence.

I only knew one thing:

Creating something with my own hands gave me a feeling I could not find anywhere else.

But outside my small world of wires and experiments, people were beginning to measure success differently.

They cared about marks.

Percentages.

Ranks.

And soon, those numbers would begin competing with the things I loved most.

I was in middle school when I got my first C. It was one letter on one piece of paper, and it felt like something in my identity had cracked. Until then, I'd always been the topper, the bright one, the kid whose grades people expected. What almost nobody around me clocked was that I had never actually stopped learning; I'd just stopped learning the things that showed up on a report card.

The same year, in the same breath, I topped my school's English debate competition and won the annual science exhibition outright, with a hydraulic dam I'd built from syringes, tubing, and thermocol that actually worked; gates lifting as water pushed through the tubes, exactly as I'd designed it. Teachers gathered around it. I explained the hydraulics with more excitement than I'd ever shown answering an exam question. I was also, that same year, still the artist everyone came to for drawings, still the kid with the handwriting teachers held onto a little too long.

I couldn't reconcile it at the time, how I could be failing in one place and winning in every other.

Once, I sketched out a design for a satellite and showed it to my teacher. She was inspired enough to arrange a study tour for me to Arfa Software Technology Park and to SUPARCO, Pakistan's national space and aeronautics center, where I presented that design in person. It's one of the best feelings I've had in my life. I was acknowledged. My parents looked proud. The organization kept the design as a token of appreciation.

A week later, I brought home a bare B on a class test.

My father took the stereo I'd built out of an old broken radio, the one thing in my room that represented everything I'd taught myself, and smashed it. Honestly, it was a lot from what I am explaining, but I don't want to express here how strict my parents became with me because of my B grades. It kinda starting to lose my identity.

Something in me broke along with it. I took everything I owned, every project, locked it in a drawer, and threw the key away. Then, without telling anyone, I carried my paintings and certificates up to the roof of our house and burned them. There were more than 30 certificates and 40+ paintings that I burned. When my parents realized what I'd done, they apologized. They hugged me. They told me they were proud, that they believed I was a genius. But it was too late. I'd already started ninth grade, and the desire I'd spent years building had gone out of me (it was not because of one incident; it was a result of continuous punishments and talks compounding over years).

Then came the time when I had to select my future. Like how pitiful it is that you would be selecting your future in high school? I had to choose between biology, computer science, and arts. I wanted computers; I loved computers. But my parents wanted me to become a doctor. They forced me to pursue biology. I couldn't protest, so I took it. Then I decided not to study, because I hated biology.

And then it arrived. A thing we all know very well. A monster that ruined the world. Schools closed for eight straight months. Online classes on Zoom and Google Meet were, honestly, mostly a waste, but they handed me something I hadn't had in years: unscheduled time.

I found it on an online platform called Noon Academy, under a teacher named Nashwa Ibtisam. I don't think I can overstate what she gave me back. She didn't just teach me the syllabus, she rebuilt the part of my mind that had gone quiet since the stereo and the fire on the roof. She made me a reader, a researcher, someone willing to sit with a hard idea instead of just memorizing an answer to it.

I can never forget her. She was the reason I regained my identity. She didn't teach me my books, she made my mindset.

In 10th class, I read The Canon of Medicine by Avicenna. Five volumes. I swear to God I didn't understand a thing, but I was in love with the book. I watched every page. Then I started reading every single book I wanted, on biology, on astronomy, on religion. All bought with my own saved pocket money.

Around the same time, I became curious about something much bigger than science or engineering.

I started questioning my own beliefs.

I was born into a Muslim family, in a Muslim country, and for generations my family had been Muslim. But at fifteen or sixteen, I found myself asking a simple question: Do I believe this because I understand it, or simply because I was born into it?

I didn't want to spend my life believing something just because everyone around me did. I wanted to find the answer for myself.

So I started reading.

Without telling my parents, I read the Bible and learned about Christianity as much as I could. Then I explored Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions, trying to understand what each of them actually taught instead of relying on what people said about them.

For a while, I was confused. Every religion had different traditions, different histories, and different interpretations. So instead of focusing on the differences, I started looking for what they had in common.

What surprised me was that many of the core ideas were remarkably similar. They all encouraged compassion, morality, and living with purpose. More importantly, they all asked the same fundamental questions about human existence and our relationship with God.

That journey eventually brought me back to Islam.

This time, though, it wasn't because I had inherited it. It was because I had chosen to understand it. I began studying the Quran more seriously, reading Hadith, learning from different scholars, and trying to separate the religion itself from the actions of the people who claimed to represent it.

That distinction became very important to me.

I realized that people can misunderstand, misuse, or even abuse an idea, but that doesn't necessarily define the idea itself. I wanted to judge every religion by its teachings rather than by the actions of its followers.

Looking back today, that period changed the way I think more than almost anything else in my teenage years. It taught me not to accept beliefs blindly, but also not to reject them blindly. It taught me to question respectfully, study patiently, and reach my own conclusions.

Whether someone is Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, or follows no religion at all, I believe everyone deserves the chance to understand what they believe and why they believe it.

For me, that search became one of the most meaningful journeys of my life. It shaped not only my faith, but also the way I approach every other question: don't assume, don't follow blindly, and never stop looking for the truth.

After religion, I delved deeper into medical sciences. Human anatomy, physiology, psychology. I bought books on medicine and surgery. If you ask me, I can step-by-step tell you how to perform a CABG or a heart transplant. But my enthusiasm didn't earn good marks.

And then things started to change for us.

In my senior years of high school, things got hard in a way that had nothing to do with any of that.

The economy was still reeling from COVID when my father had a heart attack. That year is close to the hardest of my life. Our only bike was stolen. My phone was stolen. My father was in a government hospital where we should have gotten free treatment, and instead, the corrupt doctors quoted us 1.3 million rupees for the surgery, money we did not have and had no way of finding. We spent months in the general ward. Every single day, someone near us didn't make it, and every day we understood a little more clearly that we might be next in that line (easy to write but…)

We filed a complaint through the government portal, more out of desperation than hope. Somehow, we were heard. A minister visited the hospital, and the surgery was approved. My father survived it, but he lost his job in the process, his health no longer able to carry the work, and for a while my mother's low salary was the only thing holding our household together: rent, food, my siblings' education, everything. And my poor grades were the last thing that spread oil to the fire. We were struck by the worst financial conditions of our lives, and I was the only hope for my family.

Medicine was not going to get us out of that hole fast enough, and honestly, my results weren't going to get me into medical school anyway. So I made a decision my whole family opposed at the time: I walked away from biology entirely and moved into computer science. My father wanted me to continue medical, if not medicine then any biology related field. But I took the decision, a hard one, but was logical that by getting the skills, i can freelance and can actually earn enough to supplement myself soon.

I started my degree in September 2024 on a used ThinkPad T470p, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, a seventh-generation Intel i7, and that laptop, an internet connection, and whatever was left of my old stubbornness became the whole operation. I gave myself three months just to get oriented, and then I pushed as hard as I have ever pushed at anything. Frontend, then backend, then databases, around the clock. My eyes went red. My fingertips split from typing so much that the pimples that formed there kept bursting. Keyboard keys physically broke under me. I didn't stop, because stopping wasn't really an option with what my family was carrying.

I remember, about seven months in, going to the Cardiology hospital to pick up my father's medicine, and sitting afterward in a nearby park because I was too tired to do anything else. And I cried, not from pain, but because I realized I had genuinely forgotten what it felt like to just sit somewhere quiet and be a person for a minute.

The hard work started paying back faster than I expected. At the end of my 2nd semester, I started Upvista Digital, my own web development agency, and after a slow, uncertain start, my first real client appeared, a man from Japan who paid me $500 for a website.

That $500 is one of the more important numbers in my life. At nineteen, it was more money than my parents' combined salaries ever, while my father was still out of work. It didn't fix everything, but it was the first real sign, after years of debt and crisis, that the ground under us might hold. My whole family cried over that payment. It felt the way rain feels to a farmer who'd nearly given up on the season.

From there, Upvista grew into a real studio, eventually serving clients across Japan, the US, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore, and Pakistan, a genuinely strange thing to be running as a student in Lahore, but by then I'd stopped being surprised by what stubbornness could produce.

Then, at 19, the drive to do something big made my mind start thinking about AGI.

How can we make something that actually thinks like a human? I studied dozens of research articles from arXiv, OpenAI, DeepMind, DeepSeek, Anthropic, wherever I could find them. Then I thought, prepared, and wrote a research article of my own.

I named it Project Cortex. Because it was a human brain's prefrontal cortex inspired architecture for the development of AGI. Basically multi-model orchestration, but at that time, when there was no mainstream multi-agent concept, it felt to me like AGI.

On Nov 25, 2025, I self-published that 36-page article. Got 57 professor reviews on it.

Then I had to make it real. I thought about where this architecture would fit best. The first thing that came to mind was application security. AI can code well, but being a self-made software engineer, I knew it writes shitty code and leaves security loopholes behind.

So I built Cortex EDR, a 7-agent orchestration environment that audits your codebase and finds vulnerabilities. The reports were mind-blowing. It was a hit.

But I live in Lahore, Pakistan. Not in San Francisco.

Without money, resources, or a network, I couldn't make it a hit. I couldn't even use Stripe or PayPal. In Pakistan, you don't have the same opportunities as you have in SF. I applied to YC. Rejected, no traction, no cofounder. Because there wasn't a single person in my network who knew how to write code.

I launched it several times. It failed again and again.

Not because the satellite was bad. But because the rocket had no fuel, no launchpad, and no ignition. It is as though I am holding that rocket in my hands and throwing it with my full potential, hoping, aiming, and praying that it reaches its desired orbit.

But obviously, it won't.

Not every project I've built has been aimed at a market. Anya is different, an autonomous companion robot, named for and inspired by the character from Spy x Family, that exists purely because I wanted her to. I designed her full architecture myself: a thirteen-organ system distributing function the way a body does, a NATS JetStream message bus keeping her parts in constant communication, a Railway backend, a Raspberry Pi 4B as her onboard brain, and a phone standing in as her eyes, ears, and face rather than expensive custom sensors I couldn't afford anyway.

She's become more than a passion project lately, I'm seriously weighing a robotics-focused YC application built around her, partly because AI-agent-observability has gotten crowded, and partly because the physical world still feels like a frontier nobody's really cracked yet.

Histeeria is where most of my current energy lives, an AI agent observability and trust-scoring platform, evaluating agent decisions across eight judgment dimensions with a rule-based pipeline plus the LLM judge plus the adjudicator. I built it and launched it on July 1st, 2026, the largest single piece of software I've shipped, built on the bones of an older project: an end-to-end encrypted, distributed social platform in Go that could hold 25,000 concurrent connections.

The honest state of it right now: real signups, zero paying customers, and a market that mostly isn't yet running the kind of high-stakes autonomous agents that make trust infrastructure feel urgent. So the pitch has evolved from "AI agent observability" toward the real category, "trust infrastructure for AI agents", framed for investors inside what I've started calling "loop engineering." I've mapped the competition closely: Galileo folded into Splunk, Helicone drifting into maintenance mode, Langfuse acquired by ClickHouse, Braintrust sitting near an $800 million valuation. Bloomhaus VC, a Swiss pre-seed fund, reached out with real interest and ultimately passed, citing their policy against solo founders. It didn't slow me down.

Underneath all three projects (Cortex, Anya, and Histeeria) sits a second research paper I am writing now, proposing continuous runtime evaluation as a core architecture for trustworthy autonomous agents, tracing my own arc: research the prefrontal cortex, design an architecture from it, build it as Cortex, rebuild it as Anya, synthesize all of it through Histeeria. I want it to stand at a genuinely PhD-level standard, because I intend it to ground whatever comes next.

I don't have an ending yet, because I'm still standing in the middle of the story, not looking back at it from the end. What I have is a pattern, visible only in hindsight: a kid who saved lunch money for a soldering iron. A stereo, smashed, and paintings burned on a roof. A biology stream I never wanted later became my passion. A father's heart attack that rewrote everything. The financial condition that shook the family. A $500 payment that felt like rain after a drought. A rejected paper turned into a company, was rejected again, turned into another company, and another. A professor in Okinawa I haven't written to yet.

If there's a single thread running through all of it, it's this: I have never once, in any version of my life, been able to leave a broken thing alone. I take it apart, I understand it, and I build the next version better. That was true of a toy remote-control car when I was eleven, and it's true of a company today. I'm still, in every sense that matters, mid-build, still figuring out which version of myself I'm assembling next.

This account reflects where things stand as of mid-2026, a story still very much being written, by someone who has never known how to leave a draft unfinished.