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I am a 17 year old developer and student from Pakistan who likes to make websites, apps, and games, and am currently most interested in writing secure programs. I am also known as Alimad, Alimad Co, or Alimad Corporations, yes i pretend to have a full-on company, which doent exist yet but i sure do hope it does!

Born in a Muslim household in 2008, I was named Muhammad Ali. When I was a kid, I used to completely take over my uncle's computer and wouldn't let my brother use it—I liked computers right from the start. In fifth class, I got intrigued by my cousin Arman to join YouTube. Around the same time, I used to make drawings and crafts at home, so I started a YouTube channel named "Art and Craft Ideas". It went well for 2 years—not so popular, like 400 subs. I eventually deleted the channel (don't particularly remember why, but I was a kid, so lol). The only video that was recovered and republished to my new channel was this video where i make an impossible triangle.

Then, in 2018, my friend used the new Microsoft Video Editor that came preinstalled with Windows (prior to ClipChamp). He drew a bunch of Minecraft pictures with MS Paint, put them together as an animation on the editor, and we published it on his channel. Then we made episode 2 of it, and then I made episode 3 of it. This time, I spent about 40 days working on the episode using Techsmith Camtasia, finally releasing it on my new channel (now @alimadco) at this link.

A few weeks passed by while watching YouTube, and I saw a video about a new device. The creator showed a 3D model of how it works, and for just a split second, I caught a glimpse of the software he used: "Autodesk Maya". 3D editing software actually exists? OMG ITS PAID?? A few days later, I was watching a Black Plasma Studios creation and discovered they used a free editor called Blender. It was a dream come true. I opened it up, learned through a bunch of tutorials, and went to my cousin's house since he had an actual computer. We made our first Blender animation! We didn't even know how to export it, so we literally screen-recorded the playback and published it to YouTube at this video.

From then on, there was a lot of learning Blender and making random animations—a significant one being this architectural model. We also made random YouTube videos using Camtasia, including a series called The Crash Technology and another called Introduction to Computer Graphics. That's how it went for about 2 years.

Then, in 2022, I found a button at the top right of my Blender editor. I used to use Blender 2.79b on my laptop back then because it didn't support the latest OpenGL 3.1 version (if it hadn't been for my laptop's oldness, I might have never gotten into this, but anyhow!). The button was called "Game Engine". I clicked it, switching over to the Blender Game Engine. Out of curiosity, I watched a tutorial, learned how to make something, and built my first prototype: a basic local multiplayer goal-making game called Makeways, originally released on 7/6/2022 at 1:50 PM PKT. Initially, I shared it on MEGA with friends who wouldn't actually play it, so I switched to itch.io on Feb 23, 2023 (alimad.itch.io/makeways). I continued making games in BGE for 2 more years, with my latest being Swiveling Escape. In total, I published 8 Blender games before switching to Godot because I needed mobile support BECAUSE LITERALLY NO ONE PLAYED MY GAMES.

Now starts the Godot era. My first game was a little too simple, released on Jul 11, 2023 (alimad.itch.io/polk), followed immediately by a family favorite on Jul 14 called Buggle—a bubble-popping game, but it gets faster. Then I actually ran my first game jam before ever joining one, called the Banana Game Jam! I made a game for my own jam called The Minions Resurrection. Eventually, I also got into learning Java for Processing, making a triangle area calculator and a pendulum calculation app. At this time, I was in 9th class, and by the end of it, juggling this work became hard as my parents got extreme about me wasting time online.

I still managed to make a really fun and addictive local multiplayer game in Processing called Madarea. My last Godot game, Madrun, was published on Sep 25, 2023, which was a digital board game based on a physical board game I designed a year prior. Eventually, a year later, I realized Godot wasn't enough either, mainly because I hadn't managed to export any of these games to Android, meaning phone users were stuck playing web builds instead.

At 10 PM on March 18th, 2024, right after my last 10th-class Urdu exam, I put Unity on download on my new laptop during Ramadan. It finally finished downloading at 3 AM the next morning. It was quite difficult to learn at first, but I eventually made my first game, Shootmad. A few days later, I joined my first actual developer community by submitting Zolitude to the Interstellar Game Jam 6. It received a highly positive review, and I even dropped a devlog about it on Youtube.

Later, I joined Fox Hollow Jam 2 and submitted a terrible game called Eat the Banana, but their amazing community sparked a ton of personal growth. I followed that up with Zomboozle for the Zombeez Jam (didn't win the $500 prize though) and Ikeamad for Lame Jam 42. While I didn't top the charts, I learned a massive amount and became good friends with DataPotato from the Interstellar Jam, leading to a YouTube collab with sir mister potato themself.

A year later, I jumped into Fox Hollow Jam 3 with Chromadicc and won $75, haha! You can see their feedback on my game here. Since PayPal doesn't work in Pakistan, I used the prize money to buy Minecraft. Sadly, the lovely jam host Sir Mister Joe eventually had to stop running events after getting a full-time job, which he shared about in this silent video. Around this time, I also participated in the GMTK Jam 2024, (submitted ElectroMad) and 2025 (submitted #BORED), and I definitely plan to join the 2026 one too.

While all this game development was going on, in December of 2024 during my first year at Government College University (GCU), Lahore, we ran into a smoll massive problem. The college conducts annual "sendup" tests for around 3,000 first-year students across evening and morning shifts. Seating arrangements were distributed via a massive, 40-page PDF sorted by roll number ranges. Because it listed ranges instead of individual numbers, using text search to look up a specific roll number like "3686" inside a range like "3600-3712" was impossible, forcing everyone to manually scroll through pages. To fix this, I extracted the PDF data into a CSV using Python (my first time utilizing it) and built a static HTML app to instantly calculate any student's seating plan given their roll number, which you can try out urself here, it was also released on the Play Store. It became an instant hit, serving roughly 70% of the entire first and second-year college student base! It even had a comments section with a lot of positive comments before it got wiped. The backend was completely primitive—I used a direct Firebase config inside the static HTML file to connect to the database , but it worked beautifully. This success pushed me straight into web development. I started off building basic frontends using v0 , but over the next year, I dove into authentic web development. I'm much better now, though I still occasionally stumble on super basic concepts due to my unconventional start!

By February 6th, 2025, a college friend introduced me to Hack Club—a global, non-profit community of teenagers coding together where you get rewarded with awesome hardware, chips, and domain grants for building personal projects. I dove right in after my first-year exams. My initial project was a Unity game called "GleamBox". It became a huge hit among testers, to the point where one player asked to join the repo to help develop it because they loved the idea! Unfortunately, working on it non-stop for two weeks left me completely drained, so I walked away from its massive potential. I then shifted my focus strictly toward web development projects (ignoring about 20 other projects I had planned due to scarcity of time). Meow! Now, I made my first project and earned a domain grant. The first thing I purchased from Hack Club was my domain, alimad.co.

Well then, after I purchased my domain, I started SPAMMING web projects, coz it has infinite subdomains! Im gonna terribly attempt now to explain the stuff I did in the order I remember I did it, below: One of the very first apps was also a Theme Generator for game jam themes, which is just a more convinient merged version of couple other theme generators and their word sets.
One of the many problems a man has had in his life is trying to click the stopwatch start/stop button while looking at a subject. Idk about you but at the time i found it quite difficult during a physics experiment, so I came up with the idea of StupidWatch (also on the Play Store), which only runs when you hold a button, automatically adds laps and calculates the average. Also I added some silly functions to save and load and save online, etc.
I also made a meme of the day app, which does exactly what the name suggests, also, made MegaReplace which allows people who want to repeat a set of find and replace actions, do it easier, my uncle found this a lot useful (he was the only person who ever found it useful ).

One of my first backends was MadLog, im quite hideious with it but its basically a REST KV store, but you can only append to keys (called channels), and you dont need an api key to use it! It powers all of my comment sections and more! Quite useful in logging stuff too, for example, right now I can set it up (without having to set up anything) to log when anyone clicks this button, and then I can see how many ppl did using this link. This app was based on firebase

Next up are the two projects I made for the summer of making at hack club. The first one is SOMPS, which was a search engine for the same program, it was the project that actually got me this domain (pardon me the terrible chronologicall order im writing this from pure memory ok? ). that was the first time i learnt react and NextJS. Next up I made live, because someone (definitely not Sabio Tank Tang) was attempting to show the currently online user count by using BroadcastChannels in Client of Making, which was also a Summer of Making project.

Now as SOMPS was my first large scale scrape-and-index project, I made another similar one where I calculate basic statistics for the hack club workspace members, and one that provides all the emoji of hack club (hack club emoji are added by the members, and there are nearly 40000+ emoji atp) with a single url call! Ive been using it right here to embed the emojis youve seen above too! Try that out here.

Quite a month later hack club announces Daydream, which is a worldwide sattelite game jam, but where all skill levels are welcome. I volunteer to organize it in my city. Daydream Lahore runs on 27th of September 2025, not much good games were made but I got a lot of exposure and made a few friends, more than all that I now had direction for next time.

Well then I made a couple of other smoll stuff, like a cloudflare CDN drive, a blog, a submission to r/BadUIbattles, which later on was also sponsored in a hyperplexed video :D, and a chatting app based entirely on MadLog. I submitted these projects to hack club midnight, which I couldnt attend, but in place I got an iPad

By november, a friend of mine at college introduced me to a cool platform idea, that he wanted to scale, a social app that allows you to know when a friend of yours comes near you within a radius of 2km. This could unlock a lot of possibilities like knowing how many guys are attending at a certain location, or maybe just generally use to meetup with a friend who happens to be nearby. The thing is, I didnt have any experience in React Native by then, which was the framework I chose, and ended u flopping the app , yes, my friend was real mad after that, tho, there are talks of reviving the app... I also helped QuantaraX deploy and manager their site

On october 10 2025, RGN uploaded a video on an internet mystery called the test radio, which had a substitution cipher, so I made a decryptor for it, which has been used recently quite a lot by the RGN community.

In december (2024), I made a friend during the Winter Melon Game Jam when we made the game MagnetMad together. F1nn's an awesome friend, and we still play and code together quite a lot. One of those projects is WORM, released on 26 June 2026, a game we made for the hack club jame gam, which was ysws where we had to particopate in the very serious juniper dev game jam. This can be called my most recent project, and my latest game, which ive released quite a year after my last one (GleamBox, Jun 6 2025)!

February 28th to March 1st 2026, I, with Rahambilal and my other friends, ran one of the sattelites of Hack Club's sattelite game jam called Campfire. The event was a huge leap forwards and a huge success, we made a lot of friends along the way, last but not least including the head of The Games Collective Pakistan, whom sponsored us open heartedly to run this jam at their place!

aaaaaand A lot of other stuff went down too between june 2025 and 26, but in a nutshell, these are the projects ive been doing, and this is where I am now, and I can vaguely see the direction where im headed. Well thats it for now,

also recently, I've gotten accepted into CS at FAST Lahore, and Inshallah, I'll be pursuing it from 2026 to 2030, and continuing to hack away at Hack Club events while I'm still under 18 (until next year in October). Love and peace

- Written July 9, 2026 -