“For four years, the biggest luxury at GIKI wasn’t a comfortable chair or a fancy meal—it was a consistent electricity supply,” Yasir Bucha says with a genuine laugh. “You learn very quickly that you can’t rely on perfect conditions. You have to build systems that survive chaos.” That insight, forged in the unpredictable power grid and demanding deadlines of the Topi campus, became the foundational philosophy for his entire career.
He recalls one late night in the lab, huddled with a small team, trying to power a complex circuit using only car batteries during a campus-wide blackout. “We weren’t just solving a technical problem; we were solving a survival problem,” he explains. That lesson in radical resourcefulness is what he uses now, as a successful leader in high-stakes technological implementation. He insists that his current work, which involves simplifying massive infrastructure projects for maximum efficiency, is just a scaled-up version of that GIKI lab challenge. “The world is full of load-shedding moments,” he concludes. “My job is to make sure our systems have enough battery power to keep innovating until the lights come back on.”