Field notes · Guwahati, Assam · nineteen years in

Abraar Ibrahim Bakhtiyar Ahmed

called AIBA

I grew up wanting to know where the wire went. I still do — I just have better tools now, and someone finally pays me in course credit for it.

  • Data Science & AI, IIT Guwahati
  • Pentesting & bug bounty
  • Founder, WatchMeGuru
Abraar Ibrahim Bakhtiyar Ahmed
Plate I the author · nineteen · Guwahati
The Brahmaputra, schematically. It splits, wanders, and arrives anyway.

Chapter One

Where the wire went

Other children asked what the computer could do. I wanted to know what was on the other side of the cable, and who was allowed to decide.

A packet leaves this machine and crosses a dozen strangers' hardware before it arrives. Every one of those hops is somebody's decision about trust. Most of my education since has been an argument with those decisions.

this desk the router the ISP an exchange a data centre somebody

Six hops between this desk and whoever you are. Press it.

Round-trip times are illustrative. The number of strangers is not.

Chapter Two

Six years, one uniform

It had my entire adolescence on a timetable, and I have never once been grateful for that in the moment.

Reveille before the light. Inspection. Prep. Lights out whether or not you were finished. You do not get to negotiate with a bell, and after six years the bell stops being outside you.

Least glamorous thing on this page, easily the most useful. Nearly everything I have shipped since was built in the hours nobody was watching — which is, I suppose, why I ended up building software about exactly that.

05:00 reveille
Reveille & PT Class Prep Lights out

Chapter Three

The curve I'm on

I am pursuing Data Science & Artificial Intelligence at IIT Guwahati. BSc, Honours, still in progress — I am not going to pretend otherwise.

The honest version of this subject is that you spend the first stretch learning that almost everything interesting is an optimisation problem wearing a costume, and the rest learning how badly it goes when your data disagrees with your assumptions.

The plate beside this is not a picture of gradient descent. It is gradient descent — a logistic regression fitting itself in your browser, one epoch at a time. Press it until the line stops caring.

loss hours slept problems solved
Epoch
0
Loss
0.693
Accuracy
Two hundred synthetic students. Red failed the paper, teal passed. The line is w⋅x + b = 0, and it moves because the maths moves it. The inset is the cross-entropy falling.

Chapter Four

Proof, or it didn't happen

WatchMeGuru is mine. A student accountability platform for the people I grew up beside — JEE, NEET, UPSC, NDA and CBSE aspirants, all of them promising themselves things at eleven at night. I built its AI backend.

Every accountability app I had used ran on the honour system, which is a polite way of saying it ran on nothing. This one does not take your word for it. You claim the work, then you photograph the work. A vision model reads the photograph and returns one of three verdicts. Your streak moves only on verified.

Easier to show you. Go on — try to grow it.

Seed

Streak
0 days
Verified
0
Rejected
0

Nothing submitted yet. The seed stays a seed.

Six stages, and they are the real ones: Seed · Sprout · Sapling · Tree · Forest · World Tree. In the live product the verdict comes from Gemini reading your actual photograph, so the demo above cheats in exactly one way — it has no photograph to read, so it guesses. Everything else is the mechanic as shipped, including the part where a bad submission costs you.

What it is made of

The part that judges you

  • LangGraph
  • Gemini 2.5 Flash
  • Groq
  • Llama 3.3 70B
  • Instructor

The part that remembers

  • FastAPI
  • Supabase
  • Postgres
  • Clerk

The part you touch

  • Next.js 16
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind v4
  • Vercel

The part that nags you

  • WhatsApp
  • Telegram
  • Discord

Founded May 2026. Live, early, and small enough that I still read every support message myself. watchmeguru.in

Chapter Five

Breaking things carefully

My niche is penetration testing and bug bounty. Security is not really about tools. It is about noticing the assumption everybody stopped checking.

Here is a small application, drawn the way I look at one. Six places where somebody trusted something they should not have. Pick a number.

the browsersomeone else's the APIyours, allegedly the databaseeverything file upload"just avatars" outbound fetcha URL you gave it 1 2 3 4 5 6 the browsersomeone else's the APIyours, allegedly file upload"just avatars" outbound fetcha URL you gave it the databaseeverything 1 2 3 4 5 6

Six numbered assumptions

Select one. Every finding I have ever written up is a sentence about somebody trusting input they did not have to.

Not a real client. The shapes are always these shapes.

Certifications

  • Google Cybersecurity Professional CertificateCoursera Held
  • ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC)entry level In progress
  • CompTIA Security+ — SY0-701entry level In progress
  • Cisco Introduction to Cybersecurityentry level In progress
  • TryHackMe Jr Penetration Testerlearning path In progress

What is open on the other monitor

Reconnaissance & traffic

  • Nmap
  • Wireshark
  • Shodan
  • Kali
  • Bash

Web, binaries & exploitation

  • Burp Suite
  • PortSwigger Academy
  • Metasploit
  • Ghidra
  • OWASP

Where the practice happens

  • Hack The Box
  • TryHackMe

Where the reports go

  • HackerOne
  • Bugcrowd

Chapter Six

What I actually write in

Not a skills bar chart. Nobody is seventy-three percent good at Python and everybody knows it.

Daily

  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Bash
  • SQL

When it has to be close to the metal

  • C
  • C++
  • Linux

The coursework stack

  • NumPy
  • pandas
  • PyTorch
  • Jupyter

Models, in anger

  • LangGraph
  • Gemini
  • Groq
  • Llama