Hi, I'm Harith.

Honestly, I’m just a tech nerd. These days I’m an AI engineer and the founder of DagangNow, based in Kuala Lumpur. Before DagangNow I was the camera guy at uni, and before that I was a kid trying to get YouTube to load on a laptop that had no business running it.

Where it started

I was fifteen and my parents were strict, so no phone. What I did have was access to my dad’s old gear, and he had a lot of it. One piece was an old VAIO with 500 MB of RAM. I wanted the internet badly, mostly for YouTube and games, so I had to get creative.

I learned how to install Linux. I borrowed my cousin’s CD drive, burned distros onto CDs and kept trying until one of them worked. I wouldn’t call it hacking. It was modding an old machine back to life so I could use it, and it’s how I got into tech at all.

Games pulled me further in. I’d rip open compact HP office desktops and try to fit graphics cards inside so they could pass as gaming PCs. At eighteen, fresh out of high school, I built my first real gaming PC. Once I had a bit of money, it went into microphones and audio gear. I’ve always liked the small, gritty details of how things work.

Uni, and the camera

I started at UTM in 2021. I couldn’t decide between electrical and software engineering, so I took the tech foundation first, then went into computer science (software engineering) in 2022. I wanted to be able to work remotely, and figured I could teach myself the electrical side. I’ll be honest: for the first couple of years I wasn’t paying much attention.

Then, in my second year, I got obsessed with photography. My mentor, Fika Azman, is a professional photographer, and I nerded out about cameras the same way I had about computers. I became president of the Sakura Seisaku Club (SSC UTMKL) and the go-to cameraman. People knew me as the camera guy.

I ran workshops on everything I knew: lighting, camera settings, composition, all the camera stuff you actually need to know. I did studio shoots with friends just to teach them. Sharing all of it is something I’m still proud of.

That same year a lecturer wanted to build a studio and brought me in. I was the first person to help. I had no experience, just a lot of hunger to learn. For over a year I shot studio, outdoor, cosplay and product work, but portraits are what I love most. You can see them on my photography Instagram, and I’m still digging the old ones up for the gallery.

My proudest shoot was my first concert: SOG (Sekumpulan Orang Gila), with a full orchestra on stage. I got paid for it, and it was so much fun.

Back to tech

In third year I decided it was time to change. I started joining hackathons and lost a lot of them, because I didn’t really know how to code yet. At my first, DevMatch, I didn’t build anything at all. Then I joined Loophole just for fun and built my first fun product, The Conch: you shake it, ask it what to do, and it gives you a cryptic, useless answer. Building for hackathons is what got me learning Next.js, and I’ve been diving into tech ever since.

I joined Asterisk Digital as an intern in August 2025, and that’s where I went properly deep. I was put on a mobile team using React Native and Expo, and I loved going into the libraries: Zustand, React Hook Form, state management and how it all fits together.

I moved across projects after that. I built a mobile app and then a prototype, set up EC2 instances and cloud infrastructure on AWS, and was then placed with a gas-company client doing mostly data engineering: QuickSight, Glue jobs, PySpark and a lot of SQL. While I was there, I helped build and prototype an AI tool for the whole department. In February 2026 the internship turned into a full-time job as a full-stack engineer, and I stayed until July.

Now

In August 2026 I started DagangNow. I wanted to help small brands and SMEs launch fast. Most people don’t know how to get a store online, so I wanted to give them affordable infrastructure that’s ready for the AI era and keeps them up to date. Sellers who live on Shopee, TikTok and WhatsApp get a store of their own, with an AI WhatsApp assistant, a catalogue AI agents can read, and orders, shipping and affiliates in one place.

Outside of that, I’m tinkering with AI in every way I can, from agents to self-hosting. Next on the list is my own server to run it all on.

I think you should be passionate about the things you love, and that life is an endless journey of learning. That’s the part I love most.