Bio: The Game of LifeBio: The Game of Life

I grew up on Age of Empires and Doom, and somewhere in there I decided I wanted to be one of the people who make things like that, things that look good and actually do something for the person using them. Most of what came after was me finding a way in, one tool at a time, and some of those ways closed before they opened.

Finding a way in#

My first paid work online was a five dollar Photoshop job. Photoshop alone wasn't going to pay, so I taught myself VFX and 3D, gave up on 3D when it never clicked, and kept After Effects long enough to land a seventy-five dollar contract for a gaming channel. Then my internet was too slow to upload the work, month after month, and that way in closed.

I taught maths to pay for a Computer Science degree and help my family. Teaching was fulfilling, but my heart stayed with tech. In my final year my project partner Umer and I lost our first idea when our supervisor told us it was her thesis and she'd be presenting it as her own. With ten months gone and a deadline coming, we built an Instagram-style app with live AR filters in Flutter, shipped it, and helped several classmates finish theirs along the way. Afterwards he told me to try freelancing again, this time as a programmer. A WordPress build paid three hundred and fifty dollars, a mobile app paid seven hundred, my brother Burhan joined, and somewhere in there I opened Figma and found the work that came more naturally to me than anything before it. Then six months went by on my design profile without a single message.

I was on a call with my partner from university, complaining that I could handle any design job going and nobody was sending me one, when two messages arrived back to back. One was a three-week job for three game screens. I sent them over two days later, hoping they'd like them, and the next message asked if I'd speak to the CEO. By the end of that call he'd offered me a full-time role.

The three wildest years#

One of those two messages pulled me into the three wildest years of my working life. The founder behind it was building a virtual tabletop RPG, and he wanted all of it at once, the Kickstarter campaigns, the brand decks, an admin panel, a website and the game itself. I went from designing his screens to running the product, and for a kid who grew up on those games it was the dream, because I was finally building a game.

My brother Burhan and my partner from university were with me, along with the fifteen or so people the founder had already hired, who I managed, and the specialists I brought in whenever something needed doing fast. With people that good, the one thing that could sink it was a target that kept moving, and it never stopped moving. The game was rebuilt in plain JavaScript, in PixiJS and in Unity as the requirements changed under it, sometimes with one version scrapped before the next began and sometimes with two running side by side, and nothing stood still long enough to be finished. Along the way came a webcomics platform and a website for a comics publisher. The team and I worked around the clock, sometimes twenty hours a day, and I'd still call them some of my best years.

None of it lasted. There isn't a single link I can show you, for my work or for the brilliant team who did it with me. Money gets spent, but the work is the part that's meant to last, and those years can't be shown. It's like being taken to the far side of the galaxy and having your memory wiped on the way home. I was there, and to everyone else it's as if I wasn't.

What I took from it is a line I wrote to him at the time. Pouring more water doesn't make a tree grow faster. The seed dies.

A message out of the blue#

I was heads down on other work when another message arrived out of the blue. It was from the COO of Chia, the company Bram Cohen started after inventing BitTorrent. He'd found my design portfolio and wanted a few screens for something called the Carbon Wallet. I had no idea what a carbon credit was, so I asked, and he was happy to explain. Their last designer had left after months on it. The job was planned for four weeks. I delivered it in less than one, a second week of changes finished it, and they loved it.

That small job was the start of a working relationship that's still going. Every two or three months Chia came back with another project, its own or one of its clients', and underneath most of them sat the same problem. Chia had a blockchain that could tokenise almost anything, from carbon credits and luxury goods to letters of credit, bonds and equities, and very few people could see how anyone would actually use it. So I mapped what the chain could do onto flows a person could follow, in architecture documents, full designs, prototypes and narrated walkthroughs of every flow. It gave Chia something it could show people, instead of an idea it had to explain and convince them of.

The biggest of those projects became Chia's flagship. Chia's original wallet had to be downloaded and fully synced with the chain before you could make a single transaction, which could take any amount of time, while the rest of the world had moved to cloud wallets. When I raised it with the COO, he showed me that a cloud wallet was already in the works, one product that would bring together everything Chia had built for others as separate niche apps, from fractional shares to property and equity, released a piece at a time.

The competition was fierce, so it had to look and feel exceptional, and there was no specification to work from, only calls with the team and their spoken walkthroughs. I designed it out of that fog, every screen and every interaction, through re-keying and a recovery flow with around fourteen base cases, each one different for a hardware key, a software key and a signer app that keeps the key in the phone's secure enclave. I'd built it all on design tokens, so when Chia rebranded from green to yellow and blue and asked whether two hundred screens could change in under two weeks, it took me about two hours. Today the Cloud Wallet sits in Chia's own navigation. Every screen of it began as my design, and Chia's own team built it.

Some of the work came from far bigger rooms. The World Bank and the Kingdom of Bhutan asked Chia for changes to Core Registry, and Chia handed them to me. Just running it locally meant eight repositories working together and a full blockchain node downloaded and synced. My team built the changes, and they went back to the World Bank and Bhutan through Chia.

Then the COO wanted a luxury wallet to show Chanel, Versace and Dior, one that tied a real luxury item to its digital twin on the chain. Chia asked first for screens, then for a clickable prototype. I built them a real app instead, so the demo ran on a real phone in someone's hand rather than inside a design tool, and I named it Luxkey. Chia bought a real luxury bag for the demo, and anyone could hold an iPhone or an Android phone up to it, scan its tag and watch its digital twin appear. Every round of design after that went straight into the app, and the app was what Chia put in front of the brands.

Later, Chia's engineering lead told me Bram Cohen needed help with his UX and UI, and finally put the two of us together. Bram's team was building state channels, where only the first and last step of an interaction matter and anything can happen in between, and he wanted to show the idea as three games. What I was handed was a page of wasm and Rust behind a single input field, hard going even for engineers. I gave the games a design language, prototyped them and helped build them into Chia's codebase, and the idea became three games anyone could understand.

Permuto Capital came to me through Chia too, and it was the first Chia project I took end to end, from the first idea to full engineering. The idea was stocks on a blockchain for people who had never touched crypto. Before the build, I made every decision that would be expensive to undo later, the tech stack, the database, every third-party integration down to the libraries behind sign-in and passkeys, and how the product would stay in sync with Chia's blockchain. For a company that size, the weight of those calls sat with me alone, and the first set I proposed held.

Core Registry had already shown me what the build would be like. Chia's blockchain is too big for any one person to know, so for every feature Permuto needed, whether a clawback, a redemption or something only Chia's chain could do, my team had to find the engineer at Chia who had built that part and learn from them how it was meant to work. The flows kept changing under the build, like a plane being built in mid-flight, across several environments at once. For most of the errors that came from the chain, my team found the root cause first, before the engineers who had built it. A flow that took Permuto months to draw went from idea to production in about a week. Permuto is live, and my team still maintains it. Another of Chia's clients brought me in to put precious metals on the chain, and the rest of that one is theirs to tell.

Enough about blockchain#

But that's enough about blockchain. All the while, my hands were in every other kind of project, from scrapers and automations to SaaS products and Chrome extensions. Speaking of which, word of mouth brought me AI Toolbar, which puts AI on whatever page you're on, drafting an email or summarising an article in a click. It was already a big product, with about 40,000 users, many of them paying across several subscription tiers, and its owner had a vision for where it could go next. My team and I pushed that vision further, then rebranded and rebuilt it from the ground up. Then came the hard part. Every user and every subscription had to move to the new version, and with that many paying people it had to be perfect. It stayed live through the rebuild, and the whole switch, from the new web app to the last migrated subscription, was done with less than twelve hours of downtime. After the rebuild it grew past 100,000 users, settled at more than twice the size I found it, and brought its owner substantial monthly revenue.

Some projects are big from the first call, and some only show you how hard they are once you're inside them. Audiotextify was the second kind. It started as a client's simple idea, a transcription SaaS with a GPT-3 integration, built around the time ChatGPT first came out. Running FFmpeg in the browser needs the page isolated with a pair of security headers, and those same headers stop Stripe's checkout from loading, so every time I got one working, the other broke. AI couldn't help yet, and my question on Stack Overflow went unanswered, so I went to Stripe's own developers, who confirmed the two can't run under the same headers in one project. I split the product into separate deployments, each served with the headers it needed, and both worked. The client got a product that takes audio and video files of up to 2 GB, of any length, slices them and transcribes them with very high accuracy, and it still runs and still earns.

Over sixteen years I've shipped hundreds of commercially successful projects, from SaaS products to the automations and internal tools other businesses now run on, and some of my code carries other people's brands. Fair warning, clients tend to stick around. A few have been with me more than five years.

Today#

Today all of it runs out of Silverthread Labs, the team my brother Burhan and I started in 2019. It took its name in 2021 and has grown past fifty people, it ships products of its own, Ezly and Latent, with ROIkeep in closed alpha, and my team's work runs on tools I built for it.

The kid who grew up playing video games wanted to make things that look good and do something for the person using them. He makes them now, and the calls in them are his. I take on the work I'd put my name on, for people who hand me the hard calls and let me make them. Every engagement is covered by a mutual NDA, and if you'd rather have one before you tell me anything, I'll sign that too. Now that building is the easy part, the idea is what's worth protecting.

AI can build almost anything now. Someone still has to own whether it works.