Early life

I grew up in a small village called 51/12-L. I studied there until 3rd grade, and then my father moved our family to another small village.

I continued primary school there and ended up being the topper of my school. For high school, I had to go to a nearby village. At first I used to walk. Later, in 8th grade, my family gave me a motorbike because my younger brothers had also started going to the same school.

Funny thing is, even after having the bike, I still used to walk to school most of the time.

I completed my matriculation with the highest marks in my school, then got admission to Government Post Graduate College Sahiwal . It was the first time I went to Sahiwal mainly for studying. I lived in a hostel with my friend KAMRAN and met a lot of new people there.

Then COVID started and my peak ended :(

We somehow completed our second year during COVID. Only a three papers (Maths, Physics, and Chemistry) were actually taken by the government, and that was pretty much the end of my intermediate journey.

How I got into computers

Since I was a kid, I wanted to become a HACKER xDDD.

I got my first PC around 7th grade. At that time I didn't really know what to do with it just watch cartoons and lsiten some music, but I was curious about computers and wanted to understand how they worked.

After intermediate, I got admission to ADS in Computer Science at Government College Okan Wala Bangla sub campus of Bahaudin Zakaria University and chose Computer Science as my major.

One of the first things I remember is once i called my roommate KAMRAN and he was talking about something called IDM. I literally had no idea what IDM was. I used to think, what kind of shit is this and how do I even find things like this?

I didn't even know how to search properly on Google or how to find answers when I got stuck.

KAMRAN helped me a lot during that time. He encouraged me to keep trying things, and eventually I started learning C++ from LearnCpp.

University also introduced me to programming fundamentals, operating systems and databases. C++ was the first language where programming started making sense to me.

I used to make very small programs just to see what I could do. One of my early experiments was a simple program where I asked the user some questions about things like smoking and drinking and then used those answers to calculate a very basic estimated lifespan.

It wasn't some serious scientific calculator. I was just experimenting with code and thinking, "what if I make this?"

That was basically how I learned.

From C++ to websites

After learning some programming, I found out that websites are also exist and are made by people writing code.

So I started learning HTML from YouTube.

After that I learned CSS and JavaScript. I used YouTube when I needed someone to explain something, but I always preferred checking documentation and references myself. W3Schools was one of the places I used a lot because I could read about a property and immediately test it there.

I didn't just read things. I used to make small exercises for almost everything I learned.

If I learned display property, I would try different display values. If I learned colors, I would play with colors. My first HTML exercises were basic forms with text inputs, email inputs, radio buttons, checkboxes, buttons and all that simple stuff like classic webpage that exist when css doesnot exist.

JavaScript came next. C++ had already helped me understand some programming fundamentals, so learning the basics of JavaScript wasn't completely foreign to me.

For a while I also looked into React, because I was trying to figure out what people were using for web development.

Eventually I realized that I wanted to understand the backend too, so I started learning PHP.

My first PHP projects

While learning PHP at home, I started making small projects and trying to understand how websites actually communicate with a server and a database.

One of my early projects was a very basic e-commerce website called SHOP HEAVEN . It was nothing fancy, but it was one of the first projects where I actually tried to put different things together instead of just following tutorials.

I also made a small Facebook login clone for learning.

I wanted to understand what actually happens when someone enters a username and password, how the request reaches the server, how passwords are hashed, and how the hash is stored and checked against the database.

Looking back, the project was very basic, but at the time I was genuinely excited about it. I remember showing my family and saying, "Look, this is how it works."

I was learning by taking things apart and trying to rebuild a smaller version myself.

My first real work experience

Near the end of my ADS degree, I applied online for a PHP Developer opportunity at CAT Marketing Systems in Lahore.

My resume wasn't anything amazing at that point. I had my basic projects on it, including Shop Heaven, and somehow I got the interview.

I got a paid internship and spent around five months there.

This was the first time I really understood that the applications I was building at home were very different from real-world applications.

I worked on an existing REAL ESTATE project. The project was old and messy in some places, and I got the chance to work on both the frontend and backend. A UI/UX designer would give me the designs and requirements according to the client, and I would turn those designs into working interfaces and connect them with the backend.

That experience taught me a lot about how software is actually built in a workplace. I started seeing production practices, existing codebases, real requirements and problems that you don't normally see when you're just building a project at home.

"It was a big change for me."

After that, I wanted to grow further as a backend developer, so I started applying for other opportunities.

PHPTravels

"My first attempt at applying to PHPTravels worked out."

Their assessment was to fetch a response from a Booking.com related API and reformat it into the format they required. I completed the assessment, went through the interview process, and got in.

"This was another big step in my learning."

I worked with a senior developer, Rana Wasim, who helped me a lot. He was very friendly and always willing to explain things when I got stuck.

At PHPTravels, I got to see how a real booking engine works and how their CMS was structured. I also worked on a SaaS version of their product.

This was where I properly got into REST APIs.

Before that, I didn't know much about things like Swagger or Postman. I started building APIs, handling authentication, providing data for frontend dashboards, modifying data through APIs and working with different parts of the application.

I also got the opportunity to work with the Hotelbeds API, including hotel booking and cancellation related functionality.

One of the biggest things I learned there wasn't just APIs. It was how to organize code.

Before PHPTravels, I was still doing a lot of things by directly hitting PHP files through URLs. There I started understanding why that isn't a good way to structure a bigger application. They had their own routing system, and I started understanding routers, application structure and the reasons behind these patterns.

That changed the way I looked at backend development.

After some time, I decided to move on for career growth and to focus more deeply on backend development and Laravel.

Learning Laravel

After PHPTravels, I started learning Laravel more seriously.

I went through routing, views, controllers, models, middleware, layouts, APIs and the MVC structure.

But I didn't want to just watch tutorials and say that I knew Laravel.

So I made Evently | GitHub Link .

Evently was basically my learning project where I could take the Laravel concepts I had learned and actually put them together. I used routing, middleware, controllers, models, views, layouts and APIs and tried to understand how all these pieces work together inside a proper framework.

It was less about making a perfect product and more about understanding why things are done this way.

That's something I still care about.

I don't just want to know how to write Laravel code. I want to understand why a piece of logic belongs in middleware, why something should be handled by a controller or service, why an API should be structured a certain way, and how the different parts of an application fit together.

What I'm building now

Right now I'm building Sakinah.

Sakinah is an Islamic web application that I'm building for myself. I want it to contain the Azkar, Hadith and Quran content that I personally want to keep in one place.

It's also another project where I'm trying to improve my Laravel and backend architecture skills.

For example, some of the content comes from APIs, but I don't want to hit an external API every time someone opens a page.

So instead, I'm working on bringing the data into my own database and serving it from there. If the required data isn't available locally, the application can fetch and import it first, so the next request doesn't have to depend on the external API again.

That's the kind of thing I'm interested in now.

Not just making something that works, but understanding how to make it work properly.

Where I am now

I'm a PHP & Laravel developer focused mainly on backend development, REST APIs, databases, CMS and business applications.

Most of what I know came from a mixture of college, documentation, small experiments, breaking things, rebuilding things, working on real applications and asking myself a lot of "why is this done this way?" questions.

I started with wanting to be a hacker, then I got my first PC, learned C++, made some stupid little programs, discovered websites, learned HTML/CSS/JavaScript, moved into PHP, worked on real PHP applications, discovered APIs and better application architecture, and eventually found my way into Laravel.

I'm still learning.

And honestly, that's probably not going to stop anytime soon.