The Story

Beeroo Labs is the name under which Azmeen Afandi builds things on the internet. It's not a company. It's not a startup. It's not backed by venture capital. It's just me, a 40-something IT professional from Johor Bahru, Malaysia, experimenting with technology, learning new things, and occasionally shipping products that people actually use.

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

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

  • 1998

    First Contact

    I first touched the internet in 1998. Windows 98, Netscape Navigator, the screech of a 56k modem. Pages loaded slowly, images were grainy, and yet, it was magic. That moment set the direction for the next three decades of my life.

  • Early 2000s

    Finding My Voice

    I discovered you could publish on the internet, not just consume, but create. I started HTNet (heritage-tech.net), powered by PHP-Nuke. It ran for over a decade through PHP-Nuke, e107, and WordPress. But HTNet was also the public face of my enterprise consulting work: MySQL Clusters with 99.999% uptime, high-availability databases, and hardened Linux servers for telecom infrastructure.

  • 2000-2021

    The Career Years

    My first IT role was as a Technology Assistant at Hewlett-Packard Singapore in 2000, managing 300+ devices for a schools IT support project. I then joined a small company as IT Executive, setting up their infrastructure from scratch, and was promoted to Operations Manager within six months. I spent the next years as an Analyst Programmer, building corporate intranets and reporting systems. Nearly two decades of cross-border commuting, accumulating certifications in CompTIA Security+, VMware vSphere, Splunk, and more. I served as ICT Manager in education, championing Google for Education adoption, and as a dedicated field service engineer to C-level executives. I also worked as a Lead Application Support Engineer at a publicly listed logistics company, serving as the Linux and MySQL subject matter expert.

  • Mid-2010s

    The Silence

    And then... I stopped. Blog posts became less frequent. Life happened: career demands, family responsibilities. By the mid-2010s, HTNet was dormant. I let the domain expire. Someone else owns heritage-tech.net now, publishing tech content under the same name. My digital ghost lives on.

  • 2023

    The Return

    In 2023, I enrolled in a Bachelor of Information Technology at Open University Malaysia. Not a career move, a choice. After 20+ years of learning on the job, I wanted the formal foundation to match. I expect to complete my degree around 2028.

  • 2025

    The Awakening

    I discovered AI-assisted coding, and it was a genuine awakening. After decades writing code line by line, describing what I wanted and having an AI partner generate it felt like discovering fire. I experimented with models through OpenRouter and settled on DeepSeek v4 and MiMo v2.5. I also started running local LLMs on my own hardware: no API dependencies, no subscription fees.

  • 2026

    Building Again

    Experiments became projects. Projects became products. 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. Spelling Bee, an educational game with British and American rules. Each one pushes me into unfamiliar territory.

The Philosophy

Why I Build

I build because I can't stop. Not because someone pays me to. Not because the market demands it. Because the act of creation, of taking an idea and making it real, is the most satisfying thing I know how to do.

Why I Share

Everything I build is open source. Not because I'm altruistic (though I hope I am), but because I believe that visibility creates opportunity. The work I do in my quiet hours, none of it matters if no one can see it.

Why "Labs"

Because it's all an experiment. Every project is a hypothesis. Every deployment is a test. Every line of code is an attempt to understand something I didn't understand before.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

I'm planting trees.

See what I've built