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NOTEBOOK Engineering · Research · Field notes

The notebook.

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.

Latest · 22 April 2026
ENGINEERING 11 min read · By Ruwan de Silva

Putting 5,000 travel questions on a map.

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.

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p95 latency across five iterations · log scale naïve +idx PostGIS +tiles +h3 14.2s 90ms
Earlier in the notebook
12 APRIL 2026
RESEARCH

Teaching SerendAI to read a Sri Lankan pharmacy sign at 9pm.

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.

SerendAI Photo translation Sinhala / Tamil OCR 10 min
By Anjali Wickremasinghe
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Up next

More, soon.

RESEARCH · COMING MAY

On-device sign translation — getting the whole pipeline onto a mid-range Android phone.

ENGINEERING · COMING JUNE

Day zero: how we are bootstrapping OneCeylon's first mobile app.

FIELD NOTES · COMING JULY

How one visitor in Kandy quietly shaped six months of our roadmap.

§ — Working with us

Liked the writing? Come work on what comes next.

We are hiring two people right now: a senior mobile engineer to build OneCeylon's first phone app, and a paid ML research intern to work on SerendAI. Both based in Colombo, both on problems you have just read about.