I go looking for problems.

I’m HM Nayem. Every meaningful thing I have built started the same way: I ran into a problem, nobody had solved it properly, and I could not leave it alone. That is the whole pattern. I founded Stack Learner and have run it for nine years, and I am Director of Engineering at Toptal.

I started Stack Learner in 2017 with no users, no money, and no idea how to build a brand. Nine years later it reaches a large community of developers and it is still where I test new technology at real scale. I have torn it down and rebuilt it four times, each time because the version underneath could not carry what it had grown into. Running one thing for that long teaches you what a business actually costs, where founders quietly struggle, and what is not worth building at all. I learned build vs buy decisions live by taking a lot of wrong turns.

My Toptal journey is enormous. I joined Toptal by passing a five round process into its top three percent talent network. Then joined their core team as a technical screener by passing another five round process. Over the years I have run more than 2,500 screening interviews, and somewhere in the first stretch of those I saw how rough the process was underneath. So I designed a fix, presented it, and built it, even though I was not on the engineering team and had none of the access that came with that seat. Wherever I see a problem, I try to fix it myself. Now I am working Toptal as Director of Engineering.

I am a product person before I am an engineer. When someone describes a problem, my instinct is not to reach for a technology, it is to understand what is actually broken and what it is costing them. Most of the interesting work happens in that conversation, before a single line of code exists. I like sitting with founders and pulling a messy situation apart until the real problem is visible, because that is usually the moment the right solution becomes obvious. The building is the easy part. Knowing what to build is the job.

I write about what I have learned, I build my own products, and I work with a small number of founders on the technical decisions they cannot afford to get wrong. If you want to work together, there is a way in. If you just want to follow along, there is a way to do that too.