about 🌱

Hi, I'm Haroon. My fixation with computers started young — around 9 or 10, sneaking onto my dad's laptop whenever I could. I'd seen an advert for a Cheestrings game called Mr Strings World Tour and was desperate to play it, so I went hunting for it online. Somehow I still managed to land the laptop with a virus — the ridiculous part being it was just a browser game, nothing even needed downloading. I panicked, spent the next 10–15 minutes frantically troubleshooting, and eventually got rid of it myself. That adrenaline rush of actually fixing something I'd broken is what got me hooked on these devices in the first place.

That fixation turned into something more deliberate a few years later — a Python tutorial on one side of the screen, a basic IDE on the other, and the task was simple: build a loop, execute some instructions. Watching a little turtle glide across my screen because of syntax I'd written myself sparked something that's stuck with me ever since. Around the same time, I was constantly trying to skirt the restrictions on the laptops my school gave us — trying to sneak games and do things we weren't supposed to. When we were given laptops during lockdown, I eventually figured out how to restore them and strip the school's system off completely, which I then used almost exclusively to play Minecraft.

That curiosity turned into something more concrete during work experience at Sky, working alongside a systems/network administrator. I got hands-on with Oracle VirtualBox, Linux, SQL, and Python, helping solve real network software problems. I picked up game design separately in sixth form, and later built on that by designing a platform game for coursework — the kind of practical, solution-driven work that made me want to keep going deeper into software development and systems.

I'm also interested in the ethics side of technology. Reading Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction and Mo Gawdat's Scary Smart pushed me to think harder about how biased algorithms can widen inequality, and how systems could instead be designed to empower marginalised communities. As a second-generation immigrant, that's not an abstract interest — I want a career in computer science that actually helps bridge digital divides and create opportunity, not just build clever things for their own sake. I don't see myself as tied to one specific path within computer science — I'm genuinely interested in most of it, but machine learning and ethics are what pull me in the most right now.

Outside of code: I was a community outreach prefect in sixth form (organising things like Children in Need Day taught me a lot about teamwork and project management), I work as a waiter, and I go to the gym regularly.

You can find what I'm building on github, read more on the blog, or say hi on instagram.