About · Shahrukh Sheikh
Thirteen years of PHP, pointed at whatever the business actually needed.
Not a résumé. Just the actual path from writing code for other people's businesses to building things I sell myself — and why this site is arranged the way it is.
How this started
The job was never really "PHP developer."
Thirteen years ago I got paid to write PHP. Somewhere along the way that turned into getting paid to fix a hospital's patient records, argue about parking-lot pricing with a client at 9pm, and configure a CentOS box that shouldn't have gone down but did. Core PHP, Laravel, and MySQL are the tools. The work is whatever the business in front of me actually needs — a database schema one hour, a client's Nginx config the next. Most of it isn't in a language at all; it's figuring out what a hospital's billing desk actually does all day, or why a coaching institute's enrollment numbers don't match what the front desk believes.
Along the way, "whatever the business needs" pulled in more than PHP — React Native and Flutter when the job was a mobile app, Python when a project called for computer vision or a scraping pipeline, whatever got the specific problem solved. The stack was never the point. The business problem was.
The shift
From developer-for-hire to builder who sells.
Two of the things I built — a parking operations app and a tourism booking platform — I didn't just hand over and invoice once. I sold them, under a licensing model, to more than one business. That changes how you build something. You stop asking "does this satisfy the spec the client wrote" and start asking "will someone else in the same position pay for this again next year." Those are different questions, and the second one is harder — it's a product question, not a project question.
That question is the reason this site isn't one long scroll of "things I've built." It's split on purpose: Products are SaaS built to be sold to more than one buyer — a hospital platform, a credentialing system, a WhatsApp booking assistant. Work is custom software built and sold to one specific client because their problem needed exactly that. The rest — the things nobody's paying me to build yet — lives in a Lab, because not everything worth building starts with an invoice.
Outside the codebase
The parts that aren't code at all.
I host Hamrah Podcast — long-form conversations, not a marketing side-project. And under Mountrails, I shoot and edit documentary-style trekking and tourism video — the actual trek and the real local history, not a drone-and-music highlight reel. Neither one sells software. Both are on this site anyway, because a site that only shows the commercial output isn't an accurate picture of the work.
The honest part
The bottleneck was never the code.
My bottleneck has never been technical ability. Thirteen years in, I can build almost anything a small or mid-size business needs. What I've been inconsistent at is the part that comes after building it: marketing, sales, and actually finding the businesses who need what I've already built. This site exists to fix that — a real front door for the products, the client work, and the content, instead of all of it living scattered across old client emails and a YouTube channel nobody's linked together.
Get in touch
Have a business problem that needs software?
Whether it fits an existing product, needs something built from scratch, or you just want to talk through the problem first — get in touch.
Contact me