I build things.
I'm Samiul. I build things — usually things that involve both hardware and software, often things that involve fabrication, occasionally things that involve a weather balloon.
My working philosophy has always been "whatever it takes." That mostly means learning whatever skill a project needs, even if it's outside what I was trained for. It also means doing the unglamorous parts — sourcing components in Bangladesh, writing the grant application, debugging the firmware at 2 am, figuring out the customs paperwork. Engineers usually want to stop at the engineering. I've never been good at stopping there.
How I got here
I grew up in Dhaka and went through Motijheel Ideal and Notre Dame before starting CSE at BRAC University in 2012. The robotics club was where things actually clicked. I spent more time there than in classes, won some contests, and got deep into the kind of build-something-and- see-if-it-works projects that have shaped most of my work since.
In 2014 I attended the first Kolpokoushol, an outreach program run by MIT researchers in Bangladesh. That's where the rest of this started. The people in that orbit — the global fab lab world, the Media Lab adjacent crowd — were thinking about hardware, fabrication, and computation in a way I hadn't seen before, and it pulled me in. One of those connections led to the weather balloon project, where I came on as the technical engineer to send a small Bangladeshi flag to 32.45 kilometers and bring back the footage. Around the same period I also made a short documentary-style commercial for GP Music. I dropped out of BRAC not long after.
I came back to Kolpokoushol over the next several years, first as a local facilitator and then as a mentor. In 2016 I transferred to Independent University Bangladesh and joined the CCSE lab as a research assistant, also TA-ing the algorithms course. Most of my BRAC credits didn't transfer, so it was effectively starting the degree over.
Some of the work I've taken on over the years has been pro-bono — a turtle-egg incubator and later a sensor mesh for the Creative Conservation Alliance's wild tortoise programme in Bhawal Reserve Forest. The hatchlings from the incubator are now part of an active recovery effort for an endangered species, which is probably the most surprising thing on this page.
While at IUB I worked with Dr. Mahady Hasan on a World Bank grant that funded the IUB fab lab. The lab is still running. In 2019 I went to Fab Lab CEPT in Ahmedabad and completed Fab Academy — partly because I wanted to eventually run the program at IUB. That second part didn't work out due to bureaucratic issues, so I left IUB and joined TeroLabs, a venture studio building early-stage products. The role was deliberately undefined. I ended up working on Celo network validators, a CAN bus module for driver behavior analysis, custom Segway integrations with HERE Mobility, and a stack of blockchain projects when that's where the funding was.
I quit TeroLabs in part because of herniated discs and chronic back pain — the hours and pace weren't compatible with the body I had. After a break, I joined Saiqa, an artist and animator I'd worked with at TeroLabs, as the founding engineer of Ghorar Dim Studios. She makes the art; I figure out how to turn it into physical products. We've made spinoscopes, praxinoscopes, zoetropes, and a Bangla word clock. Each one is its own engineering problem — mechanism, electronics, fabrication, sourcing, packaging.
I finished my CSE degree at IUB this semester, Spring 2026, while still working on Ghorar Dim.
What I'm good at
Electronics and PCB design. Embedded systems and firmware. Mechanical design and CAD. Digital fabrication — 3D printing, CNC, laser, woodworking. Full-stack web development, including the parts that talk to hardware. Writing grants. Setting up labs. Running workshops. Sourcing things in Dhaka. Shipping products end-to-end.
I'm not the deepest specialist in any one of these. I'm unusually broad across all of them, and I've shipped real work in each — commercial products, research, infrastructure, art objects.
What I'm looking for
A role where the breadth is the point, not a problem to manage. Hardware product companies, fab labs, R&D groups, applied research, hardware-heavy startups. Remote is fine. International is fine. Bangladesh is fine. What I care about is the work being substantive and the team being honest about what they're trying to build.
If something here resonates, I'd be glad to hear from you.
Also
Conferences attended along the way: SANOG32 (where our team somehow ranked best despite being networking newbies), Kolpokoushol 2014–2019 (attendee, then facilitator, then mentor), Arduino Day Dhaka (multiple years, mostly facilitating).