Hi, I’m Ahmed Waleed, husband to a wonderful woman and father to 2 beautiful daughters. I am a software engineer based in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Over the past nine years, my work has taken me from frontend engineering to backend distributed systems, technical leadership, engineering management and now the euphoria of AI-native software engineering. As an engineer, I care just as much about the human side of shipping software as I care about the codecraft(post AI era) itself.

I spent a substantial part of my last 4 years building enterprise network authentication as a cloud service. At Emumba, I helped take a “RADIUS as a Cloud Service” offering for Extreme Networks Platform One Security all the way from concept to production.

I was involved as a lead software engineer across every stage: initial brainstorming with Extreme’s CTO office, refining requirements with PMs, designing the system alongside principal engineers, rolling out limited availability, and finally reaching general availability and enterprise customer adoption.

The engineering challenges were intense. I, and the team, had to develop an in-depth understanding of network security, RADIUS and EAP protocols, solve multi-tenancy, scale FreeRADIUS on the cloud, decouple the control plane from the data(authentication) plane, and ensure high availability and fault tolerance under load and of course the trivial requirement of keeping authentications FAST.

Honestly, looking back at my background, I feel lucky to have that opportunity. It’s still hard to believe how much we had to learn and build in such a short timeframe. I find it almost impossible to represent the entirety of this experience on my resume - no bullet points do justice to the amount of effort that went into it.

These days, I’m also exploring how to build software with the help of AI coding agents: how to give them useful context, review their decisions without drowning in review fatigue, and stay accountable for the end result. I think my tech lead and engineering management experience transfers very well to agent-assisted software engineering. Most of the time I am doing similar work; it’s just that the audience of my work has changed. I can be less thoughtful about empathy while communicating to agents and instead focus on the task and the outcomes.

Purpose of writing a blog

In one word: self-therapy.

The tech world is flooded with content designed to sell the latest, ride the latest hype wave, or glorify effortless success. Unmoderated consumption of that stuff is a fast track to FOMO, fatigue, and imposter syndrome—and I’ve suffered from all three.

I started this blog as a way to cut through that noise: consume less, think more, and write about the real, everyday hustle. I wanted to write about the problems I faced, the trade-offs I made, the compromises I have to live with and reflect back on them honestly.

Edit September 2026: I haven’t been able to write at all given how tiring the day job was for past few years, I think I used all of my words at work in coordinating and building in a fast paced environment. However, I am looking to get my writing mojo back and hope to write more frequently.

Why not 100xEngineer?

I simply believe there is so much to learn from the ordinary, unglamorous reality of building software. The reason the industry had to coin 10x engineers was because it’s hard enough to become a good 1x engineer. I don’t expect anything less from a good 1x engineer than what I might expect from a glamorous 10x100x (post-AI era) engineer. I don’t expect any engineer to go into a room for 7 days and solve the problem in a way that isn’t maintainable for anyone and leave after a few months for the team to deal with the mess.

I believe good engineering acumen comes with longevity. You have to face the decisions you took, you have to see the bad decisions compound as well as the good ones.

Off the clock

When I’m not staring at a terminal, you’ll usually find me hiking the Margalla trails or unwinding with a good thriller. I have become a dad and it’s amazing to find time to see my 2 daughters grow up. With the amount of work I had to do in last few years, the hiking took a back seat. I am hoping to get back to mountains soon, I know they are calling me.