A Bahawalnagar engineer built his career in open source

Learning in public and building in the open

The episode opens with host Muzamil Hasan describing a change he sees in how technology products get built and launched. Founders now often skip the traditional launch and instead share a build directly on X, while developers publish weekend projects to GitHub and ask for a star or a share. Muzamil says the cycle has changed, and that GitHub is where code lives and where public work gets validated by other developers.

He frames the conversation around a question he finds more interesting than AI hype: what career is possible for someone who learns in public and builds in the open. That question sets up the conversation with Farhan, who he introduces as a contributor to Django and the creator of django-bolt, a framework with around 1,700 GitHub stars that companies are using.

Bahawalnagar, privilege, and the question of access

Muzamil raises the topic of access early. Farhan graduated from the Islamia University of Bahawalpur through its satellite campus in Bahawalnagar, a small town in South Punjab. Muzamil says he comes from a privileged household in Islamabad, and that people from smaller cities sometimes push back when privileged voices talk about opportunity. He says education has always been the thing he believes can change a life, and he asks Farhan whether that holds up from where Farhan sits.

Farhan describes the practical constraints of his town. There is no software technology park, no incubator, and few tech companies, so a local graduate has to apply online and the job search narrows quickly. He was working part-time for a company in Islamabad during his second semester, which eased the pressure to find a full-time role right away.

How open source became a way to be seen

Farhan says his interest in programming started early, and that Django was his first framework, which is why he stayed attached to it. He describes the fear many newcomers feel when they look at a large project and assume they cannot contribute. A mentorship program run by the Django organization helped him take the first step. He later contributed through Google Summer of Code, which he describes as a paid Google program that matches new contributors with large organizations, Django among them, and assigns each a mentor.

His Django contribution involved integrating template partials, and his work was eventually merged into the framework. Later he set out to build something of his own, which became django-bolt. He describes it as an attempt to combine the ease of Python with the performance of Rust, aimed particularly at building APIs. Companies use it, and at least one sponsors it.

When Muzamil asks how Farhan moved from open source to paid work, Farhan says the connection came through his public posts. He shared benchmark numbers and updates about what he was building on LinkedIn, and an international company reached out with an offer. The interview itself was not the problem. The problem, as he puts it, was that interviews were hard to get from Pakistan in the first place. Without a recognizable name or a known university on a résumé, recruiters often filter candidates out before any conversation starts. Open source, in his telling, was how he showed he could do the work. The company brought him on after a trial contribution as part of the interview process.

Why packaging matters more than people expect

One of the most practical moments comes when Farhan describes learning that presentation matters. He recalls a Facebook group where he posted a freelance requirement and received résumés. Two candidates had built nearly identical to-do apps, but one from a well-known university described his work in a way that made the same kind of project look far more serious. “Packaging matters,” Farhan says. He concludes that a developer needs a portfolio, a site, and a clear way to show what they can do, because many Pakistani companies filter on signals like school names and grades, and a plain project description rarely gets past that filter.

Confidence, communication, and the exposure gap

Muzamil presses on communication, noting that many talented people from smaller cities struggle with English or with confidence in meetings, especially in front of foreign clients. Farhan says he does not feel very confident in general, but that he speaks confidently when he knows a subject well. He describes a podcast he appeared on with his mentor, where he felt comfortable because he had done the work and his contributions had been accepted. “Confidence comes with knowledge,” he says, and he does not believe it can be built artificially.

He is clear that the path is uncomfortable. “You have to go through that pathway,” he says, adding that most people avoid it because they fear embarrassment. He says he has been embarrassed more than once and has also succeeded, and that the way forward is to keep delivering and keep learning.

Muzamil connects this to exposure. He argues that taste and judgment come from seeing world-class products, experiences, and people, and that many people in Pakistan are pulled toward local news cycles and daily frustrations, while conferences and global work sit out of reach. Farhan agrees that exposure matters and says he would like to visit Pakistan’s other cities and meet more people when he is able to travel.

AI, automation, and what the developer job becomes

The conversation turns to AI and jobs, which Muzamil says is the anxiety many computer science students carry right now. Farhan describes how software development used to work in a team structure, with architects and product designers feeding tickets to developers, and how AI has now automated a large share of that work. He estimates that more than 90 percent of development work can be automated, and says that where one hundred jobs once existed, perhaps ten people could now do the work that a hundred used to do.

He does not dismiss the anxiety. “You have to be worried about it,” he says, but he argues that the developer role as it exists today is the part most exposed. What remains human, in his view, is understanding what a customer actually needs and translating that into requirements, and then going deep enough into a technical area that AI still misses things. He notes that AI does not always write code correctly, and that a developer who understands the fundamentals can catch what the tool gets wrong. He compares it to painting: AI can generate impressive images, but nobody pays a million dollars for a generated image in the way they would for a human painter’s work. He says he uses a mix of Claude Code and tools his company provides, and that he now writes very little code by hand.

Muzamil pushes on the business side. Farhan argues that a developer who understands the outcome of their work, the problem it solves, and how it creates value becomes far more useful than one who only builds what they are told. He describes a common frustration in Pakistan, where a founder in the United States expects a remote developer to work out the business logic alone. “That doesn’t work in the new world,” he says.

Building products in an age of cheap software

Farhan says he has wanted to build his own product since he first got interested in computing, inspired early on by biographies of Bill Gates and films about Mark Zuckerberg. He argues that AI has raised the bar for what counts as a worthwhile product. Small tools that once justified a subscription can now be generated quickly by a user, so a product has to be technically serious enough that a person cannot simply vibe-code a version of it, and the market has to be willing to pay for the effort it saves. He uses link shorteners as an example, which once earned real money but are no longer a strong opportunity, and the open source tool Cal.com, which he describes as hard to replicate in a weekend.

He also points to a downside of AI for open source communities. Contributing code has become so easy that some maintainers now receive pull requests from people who do not fully understand the issue. He says some well-known projects have stopped accepting pull requests because reviewers are exhausted. Still, he says many communities keep fighting to hold quality high, and that taking part in one gives a developer a lot of exposure. He now works as a mentor in the same program that first mentored him, helping new contributors learn how to contribute.

Closing: the anxiety and the way forward

Near the end, Muzamil thanks Farhan, says he would love to visit Bahawalnagar, and says the story will inspire people. He invites viewers to share their thoughts in the comments, especially computer science students who feel anxious about where the industry is heading and what their role will be.

Farhan’s central argument holds through the episode. Opportunity is still there for technical people, but it sits deeper in the stack, closer to customers, and in the ability to present one’s work clearly. Geography can make the path harder, and Farhan does not pretend otherwise, but in his account the way through is to build in public, keep learning, and accept the discomfort of being visible before you feel ready.