// origin story · sept 2015 → today
I paid for my engineering degree one website at a time.
Bilkent University gave me a full-tuition scholarship to study Mechanical Engineering in Ankara. Everything else, I paid for myself: web development gigs on Upwork, and websites I built for my professors' research groups. No safety net. Just me, a laptop and a very tight budget.
Classes during the day, assignments in the evening, client work at night. Four or five hours of sleep, on repeat, for four years. My friends teased me about how far I could stretch a grocery budget, and how often I disappeared to “finish a client thing” instead of joining them.
I didn't know it then, but the exhaustion was teaching me something no textbook did: how to keep a promise to a client at 2am, and how to show up steady when nobody's checking.
Showing up tired and still doing the work is a skill in itself. Nobody applauds it in the moment. It just quietly becomes who you are.
learned at 3am, in a small room in Ankara
That habit followed me everywhere after: to Istanbul, to clients on four continents, and back home to Karachi. Now I'm building again, full time.
en · ur · tr · Karachi, UTC+5