The Story

Beeroo Labs is the name under which Azmeen Afandi builds things on the internet. It isn't a company, a startup, or anything with venture capital behind it. It's just me, a 40-something IT professional from Johor Bahru, Malaysia, tinkering with technology and learning new things, and now and then shipping something people actually use.

The name? A play on "Biru", Malay for blue, inspired by the street I live on.

Beeroo Labs runs on curiosity and caffeine, usually in the quiet hours after the day job is done.

1. 1998

   First Contact

   Windows 98, Netscape Navigator, the screech of a 56k modem. Everything loaded slowly and every photo came through grainy, and I thought it was magic. I was hooked. Nothing since has felt quite that new.

2. Early 2000s

   Finding My Voice

   Then I found out you could publish on the internet instead of just reading it. I started heritage-tech.net on PHP-Nuke and, one migration after another, kept it alive for over a decade: e107 first, then WordPress. By the end I was as much a publisher as a sysadmin.

3. 2000-2011

   Cutting My Teeth

   My first IT role was at HP Singapore, managing 300+ devices for a schools IT support programme. Then an education company (tuition centres and corporate training) hired me as IT Executive to build its infrastructure from scratch, and made me Operations Manager within six months. I stayed just over a year. After that came an in-house programming stint at a property developer, and then a senior technology analyst role at a Johor Bahru systems integrator, running MySQL InnoDB clusters and hardened Linux servers.

4. 2011-2020

   Return to Singapore

   A roving desktop engineer role at NCS came first, then six years in Singapore secondary schools as ICT Executive and later ICT Manager, championing Google for Education adoption and digital transformation. In 2019 I joined NTT, supporting the CEO, CFO, CIO and Chairman of a major Singapore-listed conglomerate.

5. Mid-2010s

   The Silence

   And then I stopped. Life happened, the posts thinned out, and by the mid-2010s heritage-tech.net was dormant. The domain eventually lapsed. Someone else publishes under it now. My digital ghost lives on.

6. 2020-2022

   Support & Systems

   Then the pandemic hit. Malaysia and Singapore locked down, international travel was banned, and the steady work dried up. I got through it on short-term managed-services contracts: project management, virtualisation, NAS, Microsoft 365, Intune, infrastructure and end-user support. Whatever I could do with the skills I had. Then Tiong Nam Logistics brought me on as Lead Application Support Engineer. I was the resident expert on MySQL InnoDB Cluster and Linux, and the principal support engineer for the development and infrastructure teams.

7. 2022-Present

   The Day Job

   In September 2022 I returned to NCS, a decade after my first stint there, as a Desktop Engineer. Hands-on work, and it keeps me close to the realities of enterprise IT. The experiments behind Beeroo Labs happen in the quiet hours.

8. 2023-2025

   The Second Act

   In 2023 I enrolled in a Bachelor of Information Technology at Open University Malaysia, out of curiosity more than any career plan. I'm a couple of semesters from graduating now. Then AI-assisted coding turned up. After decades of writing every line by hand, I described what I wanted and the machine wrote it, and honestly it felt like discovering fire. I run local models on my own hardware, and I use DeepSeek and MiMo.

9. 2026

   Building Again

   Experiments turned into projects, and projects turned into products. There's brl-subagent, an enterprise-grade extension for the pi coding agent; Private AI Roleplay, a privacy-first app on Cloudflare Workers with BYOK and zero server-side persistence; and Spelling Bee, an educational game with British and American rules. Each one pushes me into unfamiliar territory.