Notes from the origin.

Can you map a whole country without an API key?

Ceylon Hub is an attempt to put all of Sri Lanka, boundaries, cities, postal codes and demographics, on one interactive map using only open data and static hosting.

Building Vidura: YouTube refused to talk to my server, and other adventures

The full story of building a Sinhala subtitle app for YouTube: blocked IPs, a residential proxy, one giant LLM call, and why the UI admits what it does not know.

Why Goyama starts with a schema instead of an app

I am building an agricultural platform for Sri Lanka, and the first deliverable is not an app. It is a knowledge corpus where every field knows where it came from.

Why every project here ships with its story

The reasoning behind Prabhava Labs: open source is more useful when the process — the dead ends included — ships alongside the code.

An outage tracker has to work during the outage

GridPulse maps every power cut in Sri Lanka by fusing official CEB data with anonymous neighbour reports. The whole design falls out of one constraint: a phone, in the dark, on a bad connection.

175 million rows, two milliseconds, one Postgres table

GeoPop answers "how many people live around this coordinate?" for any point on Earth. The interesting part is everything I had to avoid doing to keep it under 50ms.

Two weeks with LangGraph: what a streaming agent scaffold taught me

Lang Stream was a short, contained experiment: make an AI agent search the web and stream its answer as it reads. The repo is archived; the lessons were the product.

Tracking 65,000 buses that have no GPS

Sri Lanka has more than a thousand bus routes and zero live tracking data. Mansariya turns passenger phones into the sensor network nobody was going to install.

The repair happened, the record did not

MendLog wants to replace the paper form technicians skip with a voice memo they will actually make. It is early enough that nothing is wired up yet, and this post says so.

Money must not float: building a crypto-to-rupee payment rail

Why a solo payment processor for Sri Lanka ended up as nine Go services, two signature schemes, and a hard rule against floating-point arithmetic anywhere near an amount.

Postgres keeps the money, the blockchain keeps the receipts

OpenTreasury is an open-source platform for verifiable public spending. Its central design decision is refusing to let the blockchain be the database.

The tutor that holds its tongue

SpeakEasy AI is a real-time voice partner for English learners. The hard part was not making it talk. It was making it shut up about your mistakes until you finish.

How much of a route counts as the same route?

TerraRun lets runners steal territory by re-running each other. That single game rule dragged me into Hausdorff distances, buffer zones, and a config file full of guesses.

Transcribe everything twice

VoiceMind shows your words on screen while you record a memo, then quietly redoes the entire transcription after you stop. Both passes exist for different reasons.

Building this site: Astro islands, a three.js globe, and a $6 asset budget

A walkthrough of the stack behind prabhavalabs.com — static-first Astro on Cloudflare, an interactive WebGL globe, and AI-generated video that cost less than a coffee.