How I got from a first line of code to building AI systems.
The First Hello World
I was 14 and had no idea what to do with my life. I was not even good at IT class. Everyone else was busy making Word documents look fancy while I sat there a little lost.
Then I randomly landed on thenewboston → hello world in C. First coding video I ever watched. I typed it out, the computer printed it back, and that was a genuinely exciting day. I went on to watch every C video on the channel.
Frontend, for Fun
Somewhere in here it stopped being a random curiosity and turned into a hobby I actually like.
In 2016 I started a web course on freeCodeCamp and properly learned the basics, jQuery, PHP, and a bit of server side rendering. It was the most fun I had had with a computer up to that point.
The Year It Clicked
A lot of things came together at once. This is the year I look back on as the real start.
I built 
Trinity College Media, a realtime sports scores and news app for our media unit. Firebase on the backend, Java for the Android app, and a scrappy JS and HTML admin panel for pushing score updates live. It has a whole story of its own if you want to read more.
More of Everything
A big year for events. Also, I kept building stuff.
I attended Google I/O Extended for the second year running. These events did a lot of work on my brain. Being in a room full of people who were genuinely excited about software made the "I want to do this for a living" feeling go from vague to certain.
School's Out
I did my A/Ls and finished school. Then a side project found me.
A street art trend was sweeping Sri Lanka, young artists painting beautiful walls all over the country. So a friend and I built HelaPawura, a free crowdsourced web app where people could pin a location and upload photos of the artwork nationwide. Plain HTML, JS and Firebase. It is discontinued and open source now.
Uni, Covid, and a Real Job
I started a software engineering degree right as the world shut down.
I joined SLIIT for a software engineering bachelors, then covid happened. I built COVID-19 Sri Lanka, a tracker for Sri Lanka, and it kind of blew up. We reused a Google Maps API key from a free 12 month trial left over from HelaPawura, which is exactly how we ended up with a 100 dollar GCP bill and no money to pay it. We explained ourselves to Google. Google just wrote it off.
Degree, AIESEC, and Questionable Side Projects
Three years of doing too many things at once. Life was genuinely good.
Grinding through the software engineering bachelors at SLIIT. I learned a lot, though I am pretty sure I picked up more from the extracurriculars and the pile of side projects than I did from the actual coursework. Both were useful. One was more fun.
Senior, Consulting, and Unwir
The year things shifted. Less executing, more directing.
Started taking on consulting work, running developer training sessions, and getting involved in technical hiring. The move from building to leading felt like a natural next step at this point.
Australia, and Going All In
Packed up and moved to Melbourne to start a Masters of IT in AI at La Trobe. Also the year I stopped dabbling in AI and properly committed to it.
Leaving the country turned out to be a pretty effective way to change direction. Melbourne, Masters, new context.
The Pivot to AI
Full shift into AI engineering.
Started an AI research internship with the molecular science team at La Trobe (LIMS). Running experiments with AlphaFold, Boltz-2 and other protein structure prediction models. Still at it part time.
What I Am Building
Almost done with the Masters. Just launched Backbencher, a Chrome extension that lets you chat with and summarise lecture videos using RAG and multi-agent AI. Still writing this page, apparently.
If you want to work together, find me on LinkedIn.