It was just after Fajr. The house was still kids asleep, the wind outside doing its usual Cape Doctor tantrum. I stepped outside with a cup of rooibos, barefoot, feeling that cold Gordon’s Bay dew soak straight through my socks. Classic mistake. But it woke me up properly. As I looked out across the garden…
Why I Don’t Care What Time My Team Starts Work
I honestly don’t know what time my team logs in. I don’t track when they take lunch. And I definitely don’t care if they finish their day at 3pm or 10pm. Why? Because we don’t hire people to be robots. We hire them to own the mission. The old industrial-age mindset where productivity is measured…
Teaching Machine Learning to My 11-Year-Old
The other night, while setting up a Docker container and trying to explain vector embeddings to my 11-year-old daughter, I paused mid-sentence and smiled. Not because she got it (which she kind of did), but because I realized this is the kind of moment I dreamed of: learning, teaching, struggling, and sharing the journey of…
How You Treat Your Team Is How You Treat Your Trust
I’ve managed teams. I’ve been part of teams. I’ve seen what leadership looks like when it inspires — and what it looks like when it drains the soul. And what I’ve come to learn, both from experience and from Islamic tradition, is this: you don’t lead people by extracting output. You lead them by honoring…
My Intermittent Fasting Journey: What I’ve Learned, What I Use, and Why I’m Not Stopping
Intermittent fasting started off as a curiosity. I wasn’t overweight by most people’s standards, but I didn’t feel like myself—sluggish, unfocused, and heavier than I wanted to be. I was 35, sitting at 92 kg, and I knew that if I didn’t reset, I’d slip into a health spiral that would only get harder to…
Raising Core Skills for 2030 (One Bedtime Story at a Time)
The other night, as I tucked Khawlah and Thauban into bed, Khawlah asked me a question that made me pause:“Papa, when we’re big, what kind of work will we do?” It’s a simple question, but beneath it lies the real challenge of parenting today:We’re raising children not just for 2030 — we’re raising them for…
Revenue Is Clarity: 14 Hard-Earned Lessons That Shifted How I Build
You can burn weeks sketching the perfect idea on a whiteboard. Run around in circles planning, tweaking, perfecting… and still have nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, someone else out there is winging a cold DM, stumbling through a sales call—and getting paid. What’s the difference? One’s moving. The other’s perfecting. I’ve been on both…
The Night My Kids Met the Librarian Robots
It started like most evenings in our home a bit of noise, a lot of laughter, and that post-supper chaos where everyone has something very important to say right before bedtime. Khawlah, our oldest, had just finished brushing her teeth when she caught me near the doorway. “Papa,” she asked, “how do those smart robots…