✽Hello, Internets!
Welcome to mutaafaziz.com 2.0: same me, now with gradients. The bio, syndicated: born in Karachi, leveled up in South Florida, moved to Carrollton, TX for middle & high school, won a state football championship with the Hebron Hawks in '05 (see blog, and every conversation I've had since), unlocked UT Arlington, and now leading engineering in Dallas–Fort Worth: currently running Watch Experiences teams at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, a.k.a. the pipes your SportsCenter streams through.
Also: dad of three, youth basketball coach, and CEO of approximately eleven side projects. This site is user-generated content (the user is me), tag-enabled, and perpetually in beta. Add me to your blogroll.
✽The Career Feed
- nowDigital Craft AI: Founder. AI for construction, real estate and events; a seven-figure book of retained, recurring clients. The main thing.
- 2022–nowDisney Entertainment & ESPN Technology: Sr. Software Engineering Manager, Watch Experiences. Backend APIs + tooling for streaming sports to 1.5 million fans at once. Rebuilt the release rhythm: weekly ships, dev-to-QA under 10 days. Digg-worthy.
- 2021–2022Amazon: Engineering leadership on Amazon Flex. Last-mile logistics, planet-scale distributed systems, metrics on metrics.
- 2018–2021Motorola Solutions: Sr. Software Engineering Manager. Public-safety comms that can never, ever page you at 3am (they did).
- 2014–2018Alight Solutions: Software Engineering Manager. Benefits platforms for millions of humans.
- < 2014Red Hat · Citi · Ambit Energy · Lufthansa · JPMorgan Chase: enterprise foundations, open-source platform thinking, mobile, and one genuinely formative run as a personal banker.
✽Mock Draft: My Career BETA
- OWNERDigital Craft AI (founder)
Owns the team. Seven-figure book of retained, recurring clients.
- RD 1 · PK 1Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology (2022)
Franchise pick. Streams sports to 1.5M+ fans at once. Brought back weekly releases.
- RD 2Amazon (2021)
Planet-scale reps on Amazon Flex. Written narratives. Relentless motor.
- RD 3Motorola Solutions (2018)
Reliability specialist. The radios can never go down, and they didn't.
- RD 4Alight Solutions (2014)
First snaps as a manager. Benefits platforms for millions.
- RD 5Red Hat · Citi · Ambit · Lufthansa · JPMorgan Chase (2009)
Late-round depth that turned into the whole foundation.
- UDFAUT Arlington
Undrafted free agent. Where software became the career.
✽Fresh from the Blog
STATE CHAMPIONS!!! Hebron Hawks, remember the name
Let me set the scene: Texas. High school football. The sport is a religion here, the stadiums are cathedrals, and in 2005 the Hebron Hawks climbed all the way to the top of it. State champions. I was there, I was part of it, and roughly zero days have passed since without me finding a way to mention it.
What I remember most isn't the final whistle; it's the season. Two-a-days in the Texas heat. Film sessions. A locker room full of guys from every background pulling the same direction, because the scoreboard doesn't care where anybody came from. A kid from Karachi by way of South Florida, winning a Texas state title in Carrollton: that's the whole American highlight reel right there.
People ask why I coach youth basketball now, why my teams run on brotherhood-hunger-discipline-humility. It's not a mystery. Somebody built a championship culture around teenage me, and I've been paying it forward ever since. Every value on The Bros' whiteboard was learned in a Hebron locker room first.
Anyway. State champs. Forever. It legally has to be on my website.
Coach's Corner: The Bros are BACK
First practice of the season is in the books and I'm fired up. We run the same rhythm every week: skills, dribbling, small-sided play, then competition and scrimmage. No standing in lines, no lectures. Reps, reps, reps.
The four words on the whiteboard haven't changed and won't:
- Brotherhood: we pick each other up before the ref even blows the whistle.
- Hunger: daily ball handling at home. The homework is dribbling.
- Discipline: take care of the ball. Turnovers are donations to the other team.
- Humility: playing time is earned in the week, not demanded on Saturday.
Parents: the practice + game polls go out Sunday nights like always. Please vote so I can plan lineups. And yes, big news: Rising Stars DFW is expanding. Fall 2026 we're standing up a 10U competitive squad plus a skills academy for beginners, so there's a lane for every kid: fair playing time, real standards. Tryout info soon. Tell your cousins.
3 comments
My son made his little brother do ball-handling drills in the kitchen. We have lost two glasses. Worth it. GO BROS!!
"Turnovers are donations": stealing this for my team, hope that counts as brotherhood
coach can we run the press this year. please. i've been practicing. this is timmy
Trip Report: Lisbon → Mallorca → Barcelona (with kids!)
Lisbon: the trams are the ride at Disney World except they're also the city bus. We learned the hills of Alfama the hard way (stroller). Pastéis de nata consumed: not disclosing. Kid verdict: 10/10 would tram again.
Mallorca: the sleeper hit. Sóller by vintage train, coves around Alcúdia for snorkeling (the water is so clear it looks like a loading screen) and a boat day out of Palma. Pro tip from my 40-tab research binge: hit the north-island coves before 10am or you're parking in Spain and swimming in from France.
Barcelona: Park Güell delivers. Gaudí was out here doing organic architecture a century before it was a Pinterest board. The kids mostly rated the lizard fountain and the churros, which is correct.
Logistics report, because you know I optimized it: every airport transfer was researched, timed, and pre-booked around nap windows. Zero meltdowns in transit (adults included). The spreadsheet has been archived with honors. Family-safe photo set coming to Flickr once the upload finishes (est. 4 hours, 12 minutes remaining).
7 comments
"parking in Spain and swimming in from France" I am crying. Subscribed to the feed.
Please post the transfer spreadsheet template. I'm begging. My last vacation had 3 meltdowns and 2 were mine.
not disclosing the pastéis count is the most honest travel blogging I've ever seen
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My computer ships code while I sleep now
So here's the setup. Four scheduled jobs run on my Mac around the clock: a groomer that keeps the backlog prioritized, a dev that picks the top ticket and implements it (tests first, then code), a reviewer that grades the pull request against the house rules, and an engineering queue for everything else. GitHub auto-merge lands whatever passes CI.
I wake up, pour coffee, and read pull requests that were written, reviewed, and merged while I was dreaming about zone defense. The robots leave each other code-review comments. Sometimes they argue. I have never felt so much like a manager.
The important part isn't the party trick; it's the guardrails. Protected main branch, required checks, the agents can't merge anything red, and a human (me) owns anything with judgment in it. Same rules I'd give any new engineer, just… these ones bill zero dollars an hour and never sleep.
Is this the future of engineering leadership or an elaborate way to feel productive at 3am? Both. It's both.
42 comments
cool cool cool and what happens when the reviewer agent and dev agent form a union
this is just outsourcing to robots. AJAX could never. actually wait can AJAX do this
keep going. it works out. trust the backlog.
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✽My Web 2.0 Startups (a.k.a. Side Projects)
Family XP ★ FLAGSHIP ★
A Windows-XP-style operating system for your whole family: chores become XP, XP becomes prizes, and the arcade teaches reading, math & circuits. Finally, software that matches this website's gradients. Luna theme forever.
OpenAero DFW BETA
A flight simulator that runs in your browser, over real satellite maps of DFW. No plugin to install, which in 2006 sounds made up. Built by AI agents.
OUTATIME 88 BETA
A neon time-travel racer: hit 88 mph and jump eras. Like a Flash game, minus the Flash. Also built by AI agents.
COLD GAS BETA
Launch an electric roadster off a ramp, fire ten cold-gas thrusters over a row of parked EVs, roll it 360° and stick the landing. Real-time 3D in a browser tab, no plugin, which in 2006 also sounds made up. AI judges score every jump.
Adhan Clock BETA
A calm full-screen prayer clock that plays the adhan at all five prayers, on any screen in the house, Google Nest speakers and Alexa. No accounts, no ads.
Hearth BETA
One remote for every TV in the house. It finds the LG and Samsung TVs on your Wi-Fi and turns every phone into a fast, ad-free remote, with one button that turns them all off. Runs on your home network: no accounts, no cloud, no sign-up form. Try the demo.
Chalk Talk BETA
A coach's whiteboard you talk to. Say a basketball or flag football play, or sketch it, and the X's and O's draw themselves in light; then an AI takes over your sketch, names the play and suggests fixes. Route tree, coverages and QB reads for football. Bring your own API key; no sign-up form. Draw a play.
KIN BETA
A tiny creature that lives under your real sky: its little world follows your actual time of day, weather and temperature. Hatch it, pet it, keep its memory book; feed it, bathe it, play fetch, grow it a garden and teach it tricks. Then put two screens side by side and slide a finger across: KIN hops onto your friend's screen. Web 2.0 promised sharing; this is sharing with legs. No sign-up form. Hatch yours or take the tour.
Hinge Pop BETA
Tap to split bubbles and keep them off the electric hinge down the middle of the screen. The smallest ones pop on it for free. Levels start with one slow bubble; two players can share a screen, one side of the hinge each. No sign-up form. Pop some bubbles
Metaphases BETA
Every earnings report, phase by phase. A calendar that draws report timing as moon phases, shows how each stock reacted to its last four reports and grades the setup going in. A fear↔greed gauge and ETF look-through tell you which reports move your money. A mashup of a calendar and a mood ring.
Metaphases Kids BETA
The Market Moon Club: money and charts for kids, with Luna. One-minute lessons, a lemonade-stand game and a pretend piggy bank that follows real prices, for ages 8 to 12. No ads, no sign-up, nothing to buy. Moon Club for iPhone and iPad is on the App Store (the app page, behind a grown-up gate).
Leadership Library BETA
A bookshelf you can browse, search and filter, with a labelled summary of every book’s argument. Tag clouds were so last year: this one has themes. On a foldable phone it opens like a real book. Browse the shelf.
SportsIQ
Voice-first AI coaching for youth sports, born on my actual YMCA sideline. Like a clipboard, if the clipboard went to grad school.
agent-fleet
Autonomous AI agents that write, review & ship code on a schedule. Outsourcing, except the contractors are robots and they live in my laptop.
Jarvis
A holographic AI assistant summoned by double-clap. The most 2026 thing on this 2006 page.
Almanac
Your biology, translated into a plan you can keep. Quantified self, before your self was quantified.
LevelUp Kids
Duolingo-meets-Fitbit for raising kids. A family operating system with achievements. (I have three beta testers.)
Market Digest & friends
Pre-market briefings, WealthOKR, TripPilot, Pathfinder, a Ramadan training guide for athletes… the RSS feed of my brain runneth over.
18 comments
I WAS IN THE STUDENT SECTION FOR THAT GAME. Still hoarse. GO HAWKS
linemen never get mentioned in these posts and yet. who blocked, mutaaf. WHO BLOCKED
we'll get you next year. (we did not get them next year)
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