History

• My mother became mentally unstable and the next three years I was heavily parentified. I felt like I had no ground beneath my feet and no roof over my head.
• Out of sheer rage I did CS50, I loved the challenge because it was tougher than anything 8th grade offered and when the code finally compiled the satisfaction was unmatched. It was really tough as it's designed for Harvard and Yale undergrads.
  • I learned how to think algorithmically and break down problems into manageable pieces. I've applied this skill everywhere in my life.
  • It proved I could build things and create some ground even when my environment was collapsing.

December 2021. Joined Dear Asian Youth (remote 501(c)(3)) as a Prose & Poetry Editor in the Literature department. DAY was remote-only and actively recruiting people

• Started deeply engaging with the editorial process, learned a lot about empathetic reviews.
• Respecting the writer's artistic integrity while giving critical feedback on what went good and what could be better.
• You can fix bad writing but not an empty page. You edit toward the writer's intent and help them polish it. This is the core of workshopping with writers. This same logic shows up later in how I redesigned DIAL's recruitment where I filtered for potential instead of polish.

This was also the first time I observed a well-run remote organization up close with different roles, structured teams, Discord set up properly, real project management. I replicated this for Breezer's Brew and eventually the DAY engineering overhaul came from seeing what a functional version of this could look like.

Published in Lamp Poetry Collection ("Death, Alas", "Nostalgia").

Academics: Completed IGCSEs. Received the Edexcel High Achievers Award and Daily Star High Achievers Award (given to students with 7+ A/A*s in one sitting).

ALEX Program (American Leadership Exchange): Selected as 1 of 5 from Bangladesh as a YES finalist. Fully funded two-week State Dept. exchange in Washington D.C. and Iowa. Leadership training and community volunteering.

The Daily Star (Contributor):

• Wrote opinion pieces and poetry.
• Experienced the exploited creative reality with extremely low wages, toxic atmosphere, and editors changing (and publishing!) my work without consent.
• I stopped going to the meetings and eventually quit. I knew what good editing feels like.

The Breezer's Brew (Founder/EIC):

• Established South Breeze School's first literary club, scaling it to a structured organization with 50+ members, mentored writers and editors.
• There was no platform for writing/art at school. I took what I learned from DAY and applied it here. I.e., stakeholder management, running a remote-only literary organisation at scale, proper project management, building mentorship and editorial guides culminating in the publication of the first volume. Remote-only was intentional to bypass school-time restrictions and so both SBS campuses could participate.

Academics: Started AS in school.

• A is the highest grade at the AS Level
• Got 2 As and 2 Bs initially. Retook physics to turn the B into an A.
• Ended up with 3 As and one B.

International Writing Program: Between The Lines

• Full-scholarship literary residency (acceptance rate <1% for internationals) by UIowa and US Dept. of State. (UNESCO City of Literature). Selected as 1 of 2 students from Bangladesh
• Explored creative writing as a tool for cultural diplomacy. Online due to COVID restrictions.
• First ever to be accepted from South Breeze School
• They used a writing platform with optional peer review. I spent four hours giving individual written feedback to every single participant. By the end, all the instructors knew my name and it was the same instinct as the editorial work at DAY where I edited toward the writer's intent.
• This shaped my brain in ways I'm still discovering because an art form I spent years freestyling and doing well in, was now revealed to me as serious pedagogy. The program director told me my writing had a lot of bilingual friction. That one comment has been in my mind ever since and has now shaped how I think about AI models and bilingual cognition.

The Breezer's Brew (Founder/EIC):

• Published Volume 1 featuring artwork and writing from 14 students (Mentored around 30 I think, the other half didn't get published, got 200+ applications)
  • Distributed across local bookstores, got an ISBN, published pdf online
  • Baatighar, The Bookworm. I have photos
• Magazine printing costs were too high and sales wouldn't break even. Bangladesh has strong garments manufacturing, we then designed and sold letterman jackets to fundraise $1150. Got so popular it became part of the uniform.
  • Generated BDT 140k here. Ended up with a 20k surplus that we re-invested into training courses
• This was the first time I made so much money all at once. It really clicked that my life is in my hands and I didn't have to succumb to the financial instability.

International Publications:

• Published in The Paper Crane ("my father, drunk, talking to me in bed"). (Indie mag)
  • Written in 2022, published in 2023.

My father attempted suicide right before my A level exams and graduation (hospitalised February - April)

• Didn't know how we would survive without an active earner
• When the most critical & foundational systems failed, systems that were supposed to protect me, I started obsessively working on architecting in long-term resilience and fault-tolerant structures, both human and technical.
• This is why I ended up with BBBC grades in A2

My return to tech started with a few key events

• Made a website for The Breezer's Brew
• My physics teacher offered me a web dev gig because he loved my website
• First ever money I made that wasn't from writing and this paid a lot more and I loved the game.
• Decided to learn web dev so I could take up freelance gigs.
• A friend lied about having a $120k/year remote cybersecurity job and asked if I wanted to work on a startup.
• I realised I did CS50 4 years back, and didn't really focus on it. I was all into writing. I remembered I genuinely enjoyed solving problems with tech and wanted to combine it with humanities.

Cofounded Sirkoi, designed the MVP (UI states, customer journey, website, logo) but left because they refused to understand the lack of product market fit, then later when they pivoted and raised $50k, took a terrible approach to building an MVP. Refused to come back after they asked.

• Rate my professor clone pivoted to AI tutor matching in Dhaka
• Note: this was before the massive influx of vibecoded AI slop apps and sites started to flood everywhere. Everything was handcoded and required me to deeply learn and understand how it works.

Joined DIAL in late 2024

• I learned about Stanford's Symbolic Systems where they combine CS, linguistics, philosophy and psychology. Realised this is the intersection I love being in. Discovered DIAL and HCI as the closest natural bridge to my interests of humane technology and social impact

• Initially wanted help with an idea for a research project, scrapped due to lack of potential. This was more of an anthropology/effect-of-social-media direction where I wanted to see how certain groups of people could develop a completely different (western, individualistic, etc) mindset despite living in Bangladesh with my hypothesis being that we grew up on the internet and that shaped us heavily. Good question, bad research idea in hindsight.

• Observed a disconnect between the research values of inclusivity and the lab's operational reality. The lab was mostly run by grad students and undergrads who had poor project management and communication skills. No proper mentorship and mostly running on informal communication.

  • I wanted there to be a proper pathway into doing research so I made one myself. Pitched an idea for an HCI internship for high school students in Bangladesh, the PI accepted the pitch but said DIAL's under capacity to handle an influx
  • Proposed software changes to make things easier and an onboarding guide to the teams working. She liked the idea but said they're stubborn so we could try it with newer projects.

• Was used to qualitative research from IAL Psychology

  • Started working on DIAL's colearning project but it got paused
  • Worked on the Nonbinary NLP proposal while teaching myself how lit reviews and NLP methods worked
    • Wanted to make a more robust version of the MISGENDERED Hossain et. al (2023) paper. Benchmark for AI gender bias.

Founded the Engineering department @ Dear Asian Youth

• DAY evolved from a student group and their problems were with scaling up. The ad-hoc systems they used lacked structure and didn't work at scale. Actively worked with different departments to understand their workflows and needs.
  • Led the migration to Payload CMS and the "Documentation as Code" initiative.
  • Implemented a design system, user journey map, redesigned literature workflow, implemented opensource systems for HR and Literature (Ghost & Frappe HR)

In both cases I realised I had to build foundational infrastructure for the organisations that needed to run better.

Got the idea for Fieldkit (opensource nonprofit stack) after implementing a few systems for DAY

• Solving Literature's Ghost usage problems proved that Standard Operating Procedures are infrastructure
• Organically evolved with the opencore business model idea, pitched it and they loved it

Instead of rushing the HCI Internship, I chose to build DIAL's digital and operational foundations first

• I wanted to build a workplace I would actually enjoy working in long-term. This was preventative maintenance for a system I intended to stay in.
• Was actively researching for the website and built v1 of DIAL's recruitment and onboarding and pitched it. She liked it but I wasn't completely happy with it

May to October

• Horrible Chikungunya & dengue with subsequent depression
• Complete collapse, couldn't get anything done

Auctus was a T20 admissions counseling service that offered a 100% scholarship

• Before I applied, I took their wall-of-words wordpress site, redesigned their entire platform while understanding their target audience to try and demonstrate value for the Feynman Fellowship, couldn't afford their BDT 500k fee otherwise
• Got rejected. Said my ECs were one of the most unique and impressive he's seen but there's no way I would get a full ride with my BBBC grades.
• Focused fully on taking mocks at school and getting my grades back up

Took mocks, got all A* predictions

• Got $5k for Fieldkit from AWS Activate via DAY/Hack+ connection
  • Met with AWS Solutions Architects (Nov) to validate the "Nonprofit OS" architecture.

At DIAL

• they asked for a website, I started building a research information management system that builds a website
• their old screening made applicants present assigned papers which filtered for regurgitating academia. I redesigned it into a two-phase system with questions that detect curiosity and grit, then an onboarding that calibrates how each student gets managed.

• Web dev freelance.

• AI-readiness consulting for SMBs
• Converting ancient wordpress websites to be LLM-ingestable. This is a boring but stable Agentic SEO business.
• Releasing opensource tools for researchers
• Doing automation work to make their organisation legible to AI