I was born in 1979, in Pakistan, into a world made of physical things. Music you could hold in your hand. Photographs that took a week to come back from the shop. A telephone that only made calls, and only from one corner of the house. I have spent the years since watching all of it quietly dissolve – and somewhere between a cassette I once rewound with a pencil to save the batteries and a conversation I had with an AI at midnight, I arrived at a conviction I will defend to anyone who will listen: mine is the most fortunate generation ever to work in technology.
Not the most brilliant. Not the hardest working. The most fortunate – purely because of when we happened to arrive. Early enough to remember the world before the internet existed, and late enough to spend our careers building on everything that came after it. We are among the last people who will carry both halves in living memory.
The Analog Years
My 1980s were Pakistan, and they were made of things you could hold. My father loved music, and we had a tape recorder made by National – the Japanese company that would later become Panasonic. He brought home cassettes of Punjabi folk and film songs, and when he was out of the house I would quietly play the very same tapes. That is where my lifelong habit of listening to music began: borrowed, in secret, from him.
The decade is a handful of objects I can still feel in my hands. The first bicycle my father gave me – and the memory of him running alongside it, block after block, so that I would not fall. A remote-control car an uncle carried back from Dubai. A monthly spy digest my father read, which I devoured in secret until he noticed and, instead of scolding me, quietly started a children's magazine subscription in my name. And cricket – always cricket – in the street and the open ground, while my mother wished I would look at my schoolbooks with even half the same hunger.
The Awakening
By the 1990s I was a teenager, and cricket had stopped being a daydream and become a serious pursuit. I was an all-rounder – an opening batsman, a wicket-keeper, a bowler you could hand the hard red ball – and I represented my school and my college. Squash and badminton followed. For a while I genuinely believed I might play cricket professionally; in Pakistan, for reasons every family there understands, that is a dream most parents gently steer their sons away from, toward something safer.
Two things from those years never left me. The Parker pen an uncle brought from Dubai when I passed my matriculation – so smooth, so impossibly expensive to me then, that I kept it for twenty years until my own sons finally broke it. I now give a Parker to nearly everyone I love. And the soundtrack: Junoon, Vital Signs, Ali Haider, Sajjad Ali, and the ghazals of Mehdi Hassan and Ghulam Ali. In 1996 I left for Lahore and my bachelor's, moved into a hostel, and made friends I am still talking to three decades later.
The Explosion
The 2000s were the climb. I started as a software developer and, over about six and a half years, moved up through senior engineer, team lead, and finally architect. Somewhere in that climb I learned the thing I still believe most firmly about this work: that success owes far less to talent than to consistency – a ritual you keep every single day, long after the motivation that began it has worn off.
It was the right decade to be building. In 2006 a company called Amazon quietly switched on a web service and the cloud was born; in 2007 a phone arrived without buttons and ended one era while opening another we are still inside. By then I was no longer only using these machines – I was building on them, on payment systems where a small mistake had real consequences.
The Social Age
By the middle of the 2010s I had hit a ceiling. I had gone as far as Pakistan could take me, and I wanted to build at a different scale – so I went looking for a global company, and a Japanese e-commerce giant brought me to Japan. We moved as a family, and at first it was a genuine culture shock. Later came a global clothing brand. What pulled me across the world was never the salary; it was a fascination with how the Japanese think – the detail, the work ethic, the patience to make things built to last.
Those were also the years the world stopped owning things and started streaming them, when the hard drive gave way to the cloud and a phone became a bank and a library at once. I spent them building systems for millions of people who never once thought about the machinery underneath – which, when it works, is the entire point.
The AI Era
In 2020 I moved again, this time to Germany – drawn, once more, by a question. Japan and Germany were both left devastated by the same war, and both built themselves back into two of the strongest economies on earth. What is it in how a people work that makes that possible? Japan had shown me one answer. Germany is still showing me another.
And it is here, in the 2020s, that the strangest shift of my lifetime arrived. Twenty years earlier, in my master's, I had studied artificial intelligence as pure theory – writing Prolog, the language where you tell the machine that an apple is a fruit and a banana is a fruit, and it works out the rest for itself. It was clever, and it was lifeless. Then in 2023 I opened ChatGPT, and the theory I had once memorised for an exam was suddenly answering me – about work, about life, about anything I cared to ask. After a career spent making machines faster, I was finally talking to one that seemed to think.
We did not just get a new tool. We got a new kind of collaborator – and we are old enough to remember when the machine only ever did exactly what it was told.
I have stopped being surprised by the speed of the change. I have not stopped being moved by it.
The Sound of Every Transition
Every shift in my lifetime had a sound, and I am old enough to have heard each one replaced by the next. Those who only read about these transitions afterward will know what changed. They will never know what it sounded like.
What We Carry That No One Else Will
Here is what makes us fortunate, and it is not the gadgets. It is the reference point. We remember what the world was like before the internet, and we remember the exact decade it arrived. We learned mathematics on paper and now design systems that process billions of transactions a day. We grew up inside physical constraints, and then we built the cloud that dissolved them.
We are not digital natives. We are digital immigrants who became digital architects.
That crossing gave us something no native-born generation will ever quite have: the ability to remember what was lost, and to genuinely appreciate what was gained. We do not take any of it for granted, because we watched it arrive.