senul mapa.

i tear systems apart to see how they're built.

and when i love one enough, i rebuild it myself.

( THE LONG VERSION )

  1. AGE 5

    i started using computers. fell in love with video games almost immediately.

  2. AGE 7

    robotics, and scratch at an academy. the love for games is what led me to game development — that's where the engineer in me comes from. when i love a system a lot i will always tear it apart and visualise building it, and sometimes i'll actually build it.

  3. AGE 8

    left the academy. i'd finish building the games we were supposed to build in ten minutes and then sit there bored out of my mind watching youtube, waiting for everyone else.

  4. AGE 9

    unreal engine. hooked. i built so many games that i never released.

  5. AGE 11

    covid. i started building apps in python and doing ml — before the world knew what chatgpt was. that was a big deal at eleven going twelve.

  6. AGE 15

    my first ever vibe coded app. yes, before vibecoding was a thing and before ai was even used in code. an ai voice assistant. it's still on my github.

  7. that kid who couldn't wrap his head around git now does everything through a terminal. opening the browser. playing spotify. all of it.

( THE FUMBLE )

the biggest fumble of my life.

tani v1 was a replacement for windows cortana. voice in, siri-style. hardcoded tasks, carried out on command. we'd already wired up groq so i could use llama models for the question feature.

v2 was supposed to land a couple of months later. it never did — my parents felt my education was moving too slowly in grade 9, so i went from the sri lankan government syllabus to a syllabus i had never touched in my life and wrote igcse in six months.

here's the part i still beat myself up over. i was sat there talking to chatgpt about making v2 entirely ai driven. my thinking was: the terminal can do everything — so what if we just let an ai interpret what the user wants and carry out terminal commands to achieve it? i was going to make it build a website from someone just asking for one.

that is exactly what modern agentic harnesses do.

i didn't know to use reddit or github properly back then, so nobody ever saw it. i think about that a lot.

i was building the right thing. i just never told anyone.

( BEYOND THE TERMINAL )

  • GAMES

    a lot. i hit unreal in fortnite once.

  • KITCHEN

    i cook sometimes.

  • ON REPEAT

    the weeknd.

  • HERO

    spider-man, and it isn't close.

  • GRID

    f1 — mercedes or ferrari depending on the week.

  • HARDWARE

    macos tahoe running on a thinkpad t480, on an ssd reddit told me to give up on and just buy a new machine.

( NOW )

i don't post most of what i build anymore. linkedin is full of people larping and it's exhausting. i'd rather just make the thing.

if you want to see what i'm building, it's on github, or it's in the work.