I’m Naeem Safdar, a software engineer working on commerce systems.

For eight years I’ve built and fixed the infrastructure behind online businesses — order automation, payment integration, custom plugins, CRMs, and the servers and DNS underneath them. Around 200 projects, for clients in the United States, Germany, Norway, Italy and the United Kingdom.

I started in 2017, taking on client work alongside a computer science degree. Those first years were mostly WordPress, mostly small, and mostly learning in public — and what kept me going was less the code than the reaction at the other end. Someone in a different country, whose business had a problem, and a week later it didn’t. That still holds up as a reason to do this.

A good deal of my work is still WordPress and WooCommerce, and I don’t treat that as something to grow out of — an enormous amount of real commerce runs on it. But the work that holds my attention was never the storefront. It was what sits behind it: an order that has to reach a distributor in a format their system will accept, a statutory 14-day deadline that has to be enforced rather than documented, an invoice that has to reconcile, an email that has to arrive.

Those systems have a property the front end doesn’t. They have to be right. A slow page is a nuisance. An order that never reaches the distributor is a refund, and a compliance record that doesn’t exist when someone asks for it is considerably worse than an inconvenience.

These days I work across Laravel, Node, React and Python as much as PHP, and I’m as likely to be building a CRM or debugging DNS as writing a plugin.

In 2026 I co-founded Stackfeld with Heinz Kubeler — a software studio building custom web applications for European companies. My team is in Pakistan; our clients are mostly in Europe.

How I work

• I’ll tell you if I’m the wrong person for the job.
• I explain tradeoffs rather than presenting one option as inevitable.
• The code is yours — your repository, your infrastructure, no lock-in.
• I’d rather ship something narrow that works than something broad that mostly does.

What I don’t take on

I don’t work on adult content, and I don’t build for spam operations or anything designed to deceive the people it reaches. I also turn down work that conflicts with my faith or with basic human rights.

This costs me some projects. I’d rather say it plainly at the start than discover it halfway through a build.