Connecting the Dots

You already know my name by now — I'm Habeeb. If you scrolled straight here, it's somewhere else on this page.

Being a young boy, I had people all around me who all knew what they wanted to be in the future — doctors, lawyers, nurses, et cetera — and I was there, confused about what I wanted to be or do. At one point a doctor, at another an engineer, at another even a lawyer. All in all, something in me knew I never actually wanted to bear the name of a defined space. Yes, I loved medicine to an extent. I loved being an engineer, same as I did law. But since I knew there was no way to be all of them, I decided to take the title of a "Scientist" — at the time, it just made me believe I could be into anything science.

Since then, I've been someone deeply engraved in everything. Then I came across the saying "Jack of all trades, master of none." This hurt me to the bone — it saddened me that I couldn't be everything I wanted to be, and be great at all of it. It wasn't until later that I found the fuller quote: "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." That settled something in me. I'm not trying to be a jack of anything. I'm Habeeb — master of one, maybe two by now, and genuinely knowledgeable in the rest. That's enough for me.

This was until I found tech (all thanks to Game Shakers). I started researching game-making and so on — I won't bore you with the whole story.

Now I find myself in tech. Started as a frontend developer, did a bit of design, advanced into frontend, got into mobile development along the way, now backend — and I'm crazily interested in AI engineering, machine learning, hardware engineering, networking, DevOps, and I could keep counting. Seems absurd, right? A lot of my friends say I should focus on "one thing," that I'm all over the place given I'm interested in almost everything (every stack, too 😂). They may be right — maybe I'll find a true path someday and drop the noise. But there's this itch of curiosity, wanting to know why and how things work — that's what got me into tech in the first place.

I could say I'm still "connecting the dots," as my good friend Nureni Jamiu puts it. But all in all, I know I'm a problem solver, and every single stack or field I mentioned has a large part to play in problem-solving. Of course, I may not eventually go into most of them — but whatever field I land in, I make sure to master my craft, right from the root up.

That's me. Habeeb — Native Dev.