"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.

Check it out spec brand identity I've worked on last year for a hypothetical music festival called Sound of Dawn. The festival is set to occur in Inverness, California during the first calendar days of winter (December 20–21 here in the U.S). The dates are important as the main metaphor of the festival is to find light in times of darkness and thus during the typical moment (the first weekend of winter) in which we usher in the cold and darker days, I felt these could be a perfect time for music and community bring us some warmth and light to shepherd us through that change of season.

The identity includes a custom variable wordmark drawn in Glyphs, a symbol, a simple illustration system (little dancing shadows), a photographic direction showcasing the warmth and landscape of Northern California and an overall visual language inspired by the wood sculptures of Northern California artists Vince Skelly and JB Blunk. I also did some preliminary sketching of how this visual language could extend to some to a digital product and website.

I've done my best to describe this here but I do have a more detailed version of the case study on my website cameronburke.xyx as well if you are at all interested.

Selfishly I would love this festival to exist in the universe one day so naturally it seems I shall share this and inspire somebody to go out there and make it happen!!

the black and pink poster looks so good