Let me be real with you for a second.
I'm KHIZAR. I'm 18, I'm from Pakistan, and I spend a lot of my time building things that probably nobody asked me to build. CLI tools. Web apps. Random ideas that pop into my head at weird hours. And I've started to think — why not write about it?
This isn't going to be one of those perfectly polished developer blogs where everything sounds like a LinkedIn post. This is just me, talking about the stuff I'm making, the things I'm learning, and what it actually feels like to be building projects when you're still figuring out most of it.
So, What Have I Been Making?
I've built a few projects that I'm genuinely proud of. Not because they're perfect — they're not — but because each one taught me something I didn't know before I started.
ECLIPSE was one of the first ones that felt real. It's a space intelligence terminal — a Python CLI tool that lets you explore space data right from your command line. It even has an AI-powered cosmic assistant built in. When I finished it, I just sat there thinking I actually made that. That feeling is honestly why I keep going.
Then came UTOPIA — a GitHub analyzer that basically turns a developer's GitHub profile into a full intelligence report. I published it to PyPI under the name utopia-analyzer. The naming drama of getting it onto PyPI is its own story, honestly.
SENTINEL is my cybersecurity intelligence toolkit. Published as sentinel-recon on PyPI. Again — naming issues. PyPI is undefeated.
And SCRIBE — an AI-powered blog generation CLI. The irony of using a blog-generator I built to write a blog is not lost on me.
And many more like that.
The Way I Actually Build Things
Here's something I don't think I see talked about enough: I don't sit down and code everything from scratch by hand. My workflow is different, and I actually think it's smarter for where I am right now.
I use AI as a collaborator. I think through the architecture, the features, what I want the tool to actually do — the strategic stuff — and then I work with AI coding tools to bring the implementation to life. I write the prompts, I make the decisions, I handle the debugging and publishing. The code gets written with AI help.
Some people might read that and think is that really building? But honestly? Knowing what to build, how it should work, and being able to break a complex project into clear phases — that's the hard part. That's what I'm learning. The syntax can be looked up. The thinking can't.
What's Coming Next
Right now I'm getting more into Next.js and building proper web projects. The CLI tools have been a great way to learn how to think like a builder, but I want to get into the visual side of things too. I've got a portfolio at khizar-arain.vercel.app that I keep updating as I ship new things.
More projects are in the works. More tools. More ideas I probably shouldn't be staying up late thinking about.
Why I'm Writing This
I'm not writing this because I've figured it all out. I'm writing this because I'm 18 and in the middle of figuring it out, and I think that's actually the most interesting place to be.
If you're also someone who's young, building things, maybe in a place where not a lot of people around you are doing the same — I hope this is useful to read. You don't need the perfect setup or the perfect background. You just need to start building and keep going.
That's what I'm doing.
More soon.
— Khizar