sanaan khalid

i was born in 2000, and for as long as i can remember i've loved computers. in elementary school i was always the kid helping the teacher with their computer, and i was fascinated by how software worked.

i made my first email address when i was 7, along with a myspace account and later a facebook account. yes, i was definitely not old enough and may have lied about my age, but to be fair i was only 7. i spent a lot of time messing around with software and games like club penguin, even if i wasn't really "breaking" anything yet.

middle school was when i started looking for shortcuts instead of just poking around. i had an xbox 360 and was obsessed with call of duty. my friends had reached master prestige, which basically meant they hit the highest level for their online character, and i wanted that too.

the problem was that master prestige had way less to do with skill than time, and i didn't want to spend all that time grinding for it. i was pretty good at the game, but that didn't matter much. so i did a few searches on youtube and google for basically "how to hack call of duty so i can be master prestige," ended up deep in forums, and after a lot of trial-and-error i figured it out. i became master prestige.

that was the real start. from there i started modding minecraft, pokemon games on the ds, and a bunch of other games too.

around the same time i got really into jailbreaking my ipod touch, which honestly didn't really do anything for me and if anything made things worse lol. but i loved the idea that software could be altered in ways it wasn't supposed to be altered.

in high school i wanted to get into gaming with better graphics and performance, and that was right around the time everyone was going all in on "pc master race" and building their own pcs. that fascinated me because until then i had mostly played with software, not hardware.

i watched so many "how to build your own pc" videos that i lost count. then i started actually researching what a cpu does, what a gpu does, what ram is, and how all of it works together.

i still remember the first time i built a pc with a friend. it was stressful and fun at the same time, and just seeing it come alive was amazing.

by college i knew i wanted to do something with computers, but i didn't know what yet, so i majored in information systems. i actually wasn't sold on coding at first. i had taken a javascript class in high school where we spent the entire semester figuring out how to move a dog across the screen, so programming felt super boring to me at the time.

my first internship was part-time at BorgWarner as a help desk intern. i worked service desk tickets, helped set up people's desks, handed out extra mice, and did all the normal help desk grunt work. i didn't mind it, and i did that for almost two years.

around that same time i took my second programming class, data structures and algorithms, and that was the class where i finally got it. i understood coding, i understood why it was amazing, and i understood that this was exactly where i needed to be.

i got good at it fast and landed my second internship at BDO as a developer, where i interned for a summer and then stayed part-time during the school year. from there i entered coding competitions, built a bunch of projects, and kept interning at places like Aldi Corporate, Wipfli, and a nearby school district.

i was on fire at that point because for the first time in my life it felt like i had found my actual passion. i knew i wanted to build things, and programming was the thing that let me do that with speed.

the answer had kind of been there the whole time, it just clicked later. i could build hardware, but that takes too long. i could build mods, but that was probably illegal. software was the thing i was really supposed to be doing.

i graduated with the highest gpa in computer science and business analytics after deciding to pick up a double major for some reason. right after graduation i worked at Caterpillar, then joined a case management startup as a founding engineer, and from there it's history.

since then i've worked across different startups, started and exited companies, worked in crypto and ai, and helped generate over $400k mrr on an app. still building today.

the main program was a 1-year intensive that i took from 2025 to 2026 with mufti rizwan ali and sheikh omar hedroug.

courses included:

• aqeedah
• fiqh
• quran sciences
• tazkiyah
• seerah
• hadith

i'm also the founder of the muslimtechbuilders newsletter.

it's a space at the intersection of faith, technology, and building for muslims in tech.

a couple pieces from the newsletter that are worth starting with.