Hey there, I’m Amir 👋
Welcome to my personal website!
I love connecting with people to learn and appreciate different perspectives. I highly value humility, honesty, and originality. I am blessed with a supportive wife and three amazing girls. I find joy in reading, cycling and weightlifting.
This space will offer an introduction to my expertise, projects and experiences.
Leadership
I have twenty-five years of ICT industry experience working in multicultural environments in Pakistan, Singapore, and Oman. Most of my professional life is spent on managing teams and projects, interacting with clients and vendors and delivering results. I have successfully delivered projects of up to 5 MUSD value.
I believe that a leader’s real job is to invest time and energy in developing healthy teams with a focus on personal growth. I am inspired by ideas of Tom DeMarco for developing thriving teams and of W. Edwards Deming for developing effective organizations.
“By using simplistic extrinsic motivators to goad performance, managers excuse themselves from harder matters such as investment, direct personal motivation, thoughtful team formation, staff retention, and ongoing analysis and redesign of work procedures.”
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Third Edition - Tom DeMarco
Some of my favorite Deming quotes are:
Any substantial improvement must come from action on the system, the responsibility of management. Wishing and pleading and begging the workers to do better was totally futile.
A bad system will beat a good person every time.
Quality is pride of workmanship.
W. Edwards Deming
Programming
Notwithstanding the fact that I enjoy interacting with people and managing project, I am a programmer at heart. Since my graduation in 1997 I have been practicing and enjoying programming. If my job role does not require active programming, I would look for opportunities for automation, scripting or otherwise helping my team mates in technical tasks.
AI / Machine Learning
When I joined academia in 2017 and started teaching undergrad students of computer science, I got the chance to work in the area of AI / machine learning. Since then I have kept my interest in the field by continuing to learn and perform experimentation.