The Conditions You Start In Don’t Decide Where You End Up

A story about growing up in one of Pakistan’s most targeted communities, and building a career in web development, design, and writing anyway.

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

Growing Up Between Walls: My Story

I was born and raised in Quetta, in the neighbourhood's of Mariabad and Hazara Town, home to the Hazara community. Most people who hear “Quetta” think of it as just another city in Balochistan. For us, it was something else entirely: two enclaves surrounded by checkpoints, where leaving home for school, work, or the market carried a risk that people in most parts of the world will never have to understand.

Since 1999, our community has lived through a campaign of targeted violence, bombings, and assassinations. More than 2,000 members of the Shia Hazara community have been killed in Quetta and the wider Balochistan region since then. The Hazara Town and Marri Abad neighborhoods where we live are distinct enough that we are easily identified by our features and our language, Hazaragi. Growing up, that meant knowing which routes were safer than others, understanding why the streets emptied at certain hours, and carrying an awareness that most people my age elsewhere in the world simply didn’t have to carry. It shaped how I saw the world before I was old enough to fully understand why. Human Rights ExpertsHuman Rights Experts

I don’t say this for sympathy. I say it because it’s the ground I grew from, and it matters to understand where the drive in the rest of this story comes from. When you grow up learning that safety isn’t guaranteed, you either get crushed by that reality or you decide to build something anyway. I chose to build.

Finding My Path

I was always a fast learner, even before I knew what to do with that. School came easily to me, but it wasn’t until I got an opportunity at **Icon Pro Solutions Inc.** that things really shifted. I interviewed, I got selected, and that’s where my real education began.

At Icon Pro Solutions, I wasn’t handed a narrow job description. I was thrown into the deep end of WordPress web development, learning how websites are actually structured, how design and function have to work together, how SEO decides whether a website is found or ignored, and how blog writing pulls all of it together into something people actually want to read. I learned by doing, one project at a time, absorbing everything from layout logic to search visibility to the writing that gives a website its voice.

That period built the foundation of everything I do now. I picked up Figma alongside my development work, learning enough UI/UX thinking to understand not just how to build a page, but why a page should be built a certain way. Today, I’m going a step further, learning to build custom WordPress plugins, moving from working within existing systems to creating new capabilities from scratch.

Writing as Both Craft and Hobby

Somewhere in the middle of learning to build websites, I picked up writing too, and it became something more than a professional skill. It turned into a hobby, a way to process what I was learning and figure out what I actually thought about it. I write about AI prompts, about the tools reshaping how people build online, and about the same web design instincts that shaped how I write sentences in the first place. Writing and building started to feel like two sides of one process: think clearly, structure it well, put it out into the world.

Building Something of My Own

Everything I learned at Icon Pro Solutions eventually pushed me to build something on my own. That became ***Slaytic, our main platform for offering web development and design services, and alongside it, [Slaytic Converter](https://tools.slaytic.com/)*, a side project I built at tools.slaytic.com. It’s a free, browser-based toolkit with over 236 tools** for PDF, image, video, and file conversion, all running locally so nothing ever touches a server. It started as a way to solve a real problem, handling files without routing them through third parties, and it grew into something people actually use.

Where This Is Going

I don’t tell this story because I think it’s finished. I tell it because I think it’s still being written. I came from a place where just getting to school safely was its own daily accomplishment, and now I’m building software, writing about technology, and learning new skills every month. If there’s a lesson in any of this, it’s that the conditions you start in don’t have to decide where you end up. You learn what you can, you take the opportunities that show up, and you keep building, one skill and one project at a time.

That’s what I’m doing. And I’m just getting started.