Available — contract & retainer
Islamabad, Pakistan · Software that businesses run on
I’m Usman Zubair, an end-to-end product builder. I turn real operational problems into production software — from architecture and databases to interface, deployment and support. Engineering, design and a decade behind the camera shape how I do it.
Currently: running Baam Crest, Merchora and The Gallery Pro in production. Open to contract, retainer or advisory work.
Still curious.
Still shipping.
01 / Products in the real world
I scoped, designed, engineered and shipped each one — and I still run them today. Each started with a real frustration; each now serves real users, in production, with me on call.
Hospitality / live
Hotel software for places where the internet gives up. Rooms, restaurant and sales keep working offline, then sync back to the cloud when the line returns.
In daily use at a northern-Pakistan hotel — front desk, restaurant and reporting — through outages that take other systems down.
Rust · Tauri · React · SQLiteVisit product ↗ How the offline sync works ↗
Commerce / live
A multi-tenant e-commerce platform built for Pakistan and the markets the big platforms overlook — local payments, local logistics, no per-order platform commission.
Live merchants running full storefronts on it — catalogue, orders and checkout — on infrastructure I operate myself.
Rust · PostgreSQL · Astro · CloudflareVisit product ↗
Photography / live
A complete working home for photographers: client galleries, album proofing, CRM, billing and a licensed desktop album designer.
Photography studios deliver client galleries and proof albums through it — a workflow I ran myself for a decade before building the tool for it.
Go · SvelteKit · PostgreSQL · TauriVisit product ↗02 / Why the work is different
A camera taught me to notice. Engineering taught me to test. Travel taught me to adapt. Years of working with people taught me to listen. Code gave me the leverage to turn all four into products people rely on.
I began with machines, CAD/CAM and finite-element thinking. From there I moved through graphic design, film and photography, then into websites and full-stack software. None of those chapters disappeared — they still shape how I understand a vague brief, design an interface and build for real constraints: unreliable internet, limited budgets and people who should not need technical training to use good software.
Today I build and run production platforms with Rust, Go, React, Svelte, PostgreSQL and AI in the daily loop. The tools have changed, but the instinct has not: notice carefully, listen properly, test honestly — and finish what I start.
Mechanical engineering
B.Sc. (Hons), BZU — CAD/CAM, FEA, systems. Design for the limits before designing for the demo.
Images that move
Weddings, documentary and portraits — then film, motion and 3D, on deadline and for clients. Finalist at Nikon Film Festival Pakistan and the 60-Second International Film Festival. Deciding what belongs in the frame and what gets cut — interfaces get composed, not assembled from defaults.
Design into code
Sites for hospitals, schools, resorts, nonprofits and stores — most commissioning software for the first time. Fuzzy briefs, turned into things people recognise.
Platforms of my own
Three live systems, run as carefully as they were written — including the parts nobody sees until they break.
03 / Where the eye came from
Before the software there was photography — through Nepal, Iran, Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and across Pakistan by motorcycle. I’ve guided visitors from abroad into the mountains, documenting the journey as we went.
Most of it happened a long way from a studio: weeks on the trail, high passes and glacier camps, working alongside people whose language I didn’t share. You learn to read a room without words, to earn trust before the shutter, and to keep going when the plan, the light and the weather all change at once.
Those lessons stayed with me. It’s why The Gallery Pro exists — and why the software I build begins with people rather than features.
Published & licensed by New Lines Magazine · BBC · UNESCO · Upon Faith, Brooklyn
Enter the photography archive ↗04 / Work with consequence
At Jabir Bin Hayyan Trust, I travel to underserved communities to document people and programmes with dignity — and I built the organisation’s website too.
Social impact is not a separate portfolio category for me. It is present in the schools, hospital and nonprofit work I take on; in software made for overlooked markets; and in the way I listen before I build.
Visit Jabir Bin Hayyan Trust ↗