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NHNeeam Hayder — home

The full journey

Who I am, mapped.

I'm a Computer Science student at St. John's University, but that's only the visible half. The rest of my time goes to a habit I can't shake: chasing an idea until I understand it, then writing it down so it connects to everything else I know. My notes span machine learning and cryptography, but also Islamic theology, metaphysics from Plato to Kant, and the mathematics underneath all of it. This page is the map of that journey.

Know, then believe.

The tradition I study frames reason as the guard standing at the throne of the mind — it tests every claim, and only steps aside for what it has verified as true. That's how I try to hold everything: theology, a research result, or a line of code. Conviction is what's left after understanding, not a substitute for it.

the throughline of how I study

Constellations

The fields I study

These don't sit in separate boxes. In my notes they cross-link constantly — a proof technique lighting up an argument in theology, an idea in metaphysics reshaping how I read a result. The lines are real connections.

  • Computer Science

    Operating systems, algorithms, systems that run.

  • Machine Learning

    From Andrew Ng's specialization to research pipelines.

  • Cryptography

    Perfect secrecy, block ciphers, number theory.

  • Mathematics

    Calculus, linear algebra, probability.

  • Metaphysics

    Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant.

  • Theology

    The names, attributes, and proofs of the Divine.

  • Usul ul-Fiqh

    How rulings derive from evidence.

  • Qur'an & Hadith

    Primary texts and the science of narration.

  • Economics

    Markets, incentives, and scarce choices.

Trajectory

How I got here

Not a résumé — the turning points that actually changed direction.

  1. The spark

    Programming, through games

    I fell for code the way a lot of people do — trying to build the games I loved. Pygame spaceships, a 2D adventure engine in raw Java, a console 2048. Each one taught me something a tutorial never could.

  2. 2024

    St. John's University — Computer Science

    The formal foundation: data structures, operating systems, cryptography. This is where the intuition from side projects met the theory that explains why it works.

  3. Ongoing

    The Corpus of Mind

    I keep a Zettelkasten — roughly a hundred atomic, cross-linked notes spanning every subject I study. Writing to understand, then linking to connect. It's the closest thing I have to a second brain.

  4. Ongoing

    The Islamic sciences

    In parallel with my degree, I study theology, jurisprudence, and the Qur'an through the Murabbi Development Program and weekly study circles. Faith pursued with the same rigor I bring to a proof.

  5. 2025 — present

    Research at the Bukhari Lab

    Applying ML to healthcare informatics under Dr. Bukhari — where the messiness of real clinical data meets the models that could learn from it. My first co-authored paper came out of this.

  6. Now

    Building tools that ship

    Teemo (an AI course creator), DingID (a facial-recognition doorbell), Brunch (a deployed blog platform). Ideas taken all the way from problem to production.

Beyond the terminal

What keeps it honest

The practices that hold the intellectual work together.

A note a day

Daily notes, morning reflections, and a rotating pool of wisdom on knowledge and perseverance — from the Qur'an, hadith, classical scholars, and scientists like Feynman and Curie.

Discipline in the gym

Progressive overload, logged rep by rep. The body and the mind respond to the same thing: consistent, deliberate effort over a long horizon.

Stories at the table

A long-running Dungeons & Dragons campaign — Children of the Sand. Collaborative worldbuilding is its own kind of engineering.

Faith as foundation

Everything above sits on it. The pursuit of beneficial knowledge isn't a hobby I fit around my life — for me it's the point of it.

That's the map. Want to see where it leads?