faiz.al — Zeeshan Faizal
Heya, I'm Zeeshan. From Pacific Beach, San Diego, I build technology that grows things — food, software, people. I work on products at Rise Gardens and Maximal. This site is a collection of works by me, or that I find myself referring to often. With JavaScript on, it's a four-scene point-and-click pixel game that follows your local clock from dawn to night: a Spanish villa, a wide garage-workshop (the shop: workbench and machines, a deep bay with a BMW R90 scrambler parked in the spot the car lost to the projects, a pair of model boats and a golf simulator), a library, and a backyard garden. Three animals patrol the place — Munchie the wide-eyed Savannah cat supervising the shop bench, Nala the Lhasa Apso sweeping the library floor for scraps, and Paisley asleep on the garden lawn — and all three can be petted (press and hold). Eight maxims are carved into the walls; the game keeps count as you find them. Click everything.
Work
- Rise Gardens (risegardens.com) — indoor hydroponic smart gardens: hardware from single-family units to the Roots line, plus companion software. I run the company end to end: product, engineering, finance, ops, marketing, support.
- Harvest2O — the Rise Gardens companion app (React Native + Flask API): guides planting, doses nutrients, schedules lighting, tracks plants.
- Gini — my AI agent office: an orchestrator, eight specialist agents, and a shared knowledge graph. Built 2026.
- Maximal (maximalproduction.com) — product studio, pre-Rise.
- Creative work — skits (Bouncer Vengeance Bit), short films (Battle), short stories (Coverts).
Maxims
Engraved around the four scenes, one inscription at a time:
- Salus populi suprema lex — the good of the people is the supreme law
- To find yourself, think for yourself
- Have undeniable proof that you are who you say you are
- Ekam sat vipraha bahudaha vadanti — the truth is one but comes in many forms
- Surround yourself with people better than you
- Use the difficulty; the obstacle is the way
- Seek truth, always
- When knowledge is abundant, attention is scarce
The Library
Every spine on the shelf is a real book from my list. In the game each one opens with its history and why I keep coming back to it.
Current Rotation
I enjoy reading a bunch of books at once and therefore have a rotation.
- Rad Future — Isabelle Boemeke. Energy abundance is upstream of everything I'm building.
- The Covenant of Water — Abraham Verghese. Medicine written as devotion, by someone who still practices it.
Recommendations (8+/10) — Fiction
"'Tis strange—but true; for truth is always strange; / Stranger than fiction." — Byron
- 50 Plants That Changed the Course of History — Bill Laws
- The Rosie Project — Graeme Simsion
- The Bed of Procrustes — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Animal Farm — George Orwell
- 1984 — George Orwell
- Lord of the Flies — William Golding
- The Apology — Plato
Recommendations (8+/10) — Non-Fiction
- Read, Write, Own — Chris Dixon
- The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality — Frank Wilczek
- Poor Charlie's Almanack — Peter Kaufman (ed.)
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant — Eric Jorgenson
- Numbers Don't Lie — Vaclav Smil
- High Growth Handbook — Elad Gil
- Quran
- Torah
- Bible
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
- Zero to One — Peter Thiel with Blake Masters
- Shoe Dog — Phil Knight
- The Emperor of All Maladies — Siddhartha Mukherjee
- The Song of the Cell — Siddhartha Mukherjee
- The 4-Hour Body — Timothy Ferriss
- When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi
- The Obstacle Is the Way — Ryan Holiday
- The Republic — Plato
- The Signal and the Noise — Nate Silver
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — Benjamin Franklin
- The Checklist Manifesto — Atul Gawande
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering — Richard Hamming
- Kaffir Boy — Mark Mathabane