Where the engineers and researchers at OneCeylon write about what they are making. No hot takes, no roadmaps — just the work, and what we learned doing it.
One config object, two ways to send a message, and a callback that stopped being true after the first render. Replies, photos and locations were silently dropped — but only on the keyboard path, and only in a way nobody could report.
Our Web Push had a settings toggle, a green "On for this browser", and a zero percent delivery rate. Two independently fatal bugs — and error handling that named only the failures we had predicted, leaving success as the unhandled remainder.
A traveller standing in Galle Fort wants to know what people have asked about the streets around her. The first version of our query took fourteen seconds. Here is how we got it to ninety milliseconds — and the clustering algorithm we picked along the way.
A field report on multilingual photo translation for travellers in Sri Lanka. How we got from "unusable on real street signs" to something a visitor in Nuwara Eliya can trust after dark — and the preprocessing trick that finally moved the numbers.
We are hiring two people right now: a senior backend engineer to own the API and the data platform underneath all of this, and a paid ML research intern to work on SerendAI. Both based in Colombo, both on problems you have just read about.
