Okay, this one made me smile!

I just found out I’m in the top 1% of creatives on Contra.

Really grateful for every project, every client who’s trusted me, and all the work that got me here.

I started my freelance journey here in Contra just ~4 months ago, after a bit of a low point, so I’m especially grateful for how far I’ve come and everything that’s happened since. 🫶

Wow congrats!! Any tips for someone starting out?

"Zahid has successfully delivered and deployed HCM within our company."

That's from the client review that landed on my profile this week, for OneHub — the payroll and people-operations platform I built for TechFoundry. Monthly payroll with fiscal-year tax withholding, payslips and tax certificates on demand, expense reports read line by line by Claude, and one reporting layer so the dashboard, the payslip and the certificate always agree.

The word I care about in that review is "deployed". Delivered means the code works. Deployed means payroll runs on it every month, people are paid the right amount, and nobody has to call me.

The thing I'd do differently: the tax rules started out hard-coded. Fine for one country, one fiscal year — until it wasn't. We later pulled them out into a rules engine so the same payroll runs across countries without touching the code. Next time that's day one, not a refactor.

It's also a Contra-verified project — the work was paid through Contra, so the review and the case study are tied to the same engagement. Case study: https://contra.com/p/Y3EgrEUc-payroll-and-people-operations-platform

Shipping a complete payroll and fiscal-year tax withholding engine straight to production is a major milestone! Full-stack execution at its finest.