one sec — warming things up...
open to collabs & side quests
hello world, I'm
Enthusiast, not professional. I code for fun, photograph everything else, and built this whole site myself — from Sri Lanka, with a lot of tea.
$ whoami
enthusiast · tinkerer · guy with a camera
$ cat about.txt
"not a pro — just really into this stuff"
$ ls ./current_obsessions
nextjs/ cameras/ selfhosting/ tea/
$ ls ./gallery | wc -l
✦ 12 photos and counting ✦
$
// 01
Who I am, in slightly too many words
tinkering for
5+ yrs
Hey, I'm Akila. I'm Akila — and no, I'm not a professional developer or a professional photographer. I'm just someone who genuinely likes making things.
By night I'm usually in a terminal somewhere: little web experiments, scripts that fix problems only I have, and a home server that stays up most of the time. On weekends I carry a camera around Sri Lanka — hills, coast, streets, the occasional night sky — and I've stopped pretending I'll ever sort the photo library properly.
This site is one of my favourite experiments so far. I built the whole thing myself: the animations, the admin panel where I edit everything, even the words you're reading right now. It broke many times along the way. That's kind of the fun part.
currently into
next.js, self-hosting & old lenses
cameras owned
more than I need, fewer than I want
weekend status
out shooting somewhere in the hills
fuel of choice
plain tea, three sugars
// 02
Things I've built — some useful, some just fun
01 · favourite
▸ more from the lab
A small pipeline that grabs photos off my SD cards, sorts them by date and place, backs them up, and pushes the keepers to cloud storage. Built it because doing this by hand got old around trip number three. It has saved roughly 40 GB of holiday memories so far.
An old PC that refused to die, so now it runs my files, my backups and a couple of self-hosted apps. Current uptime record: 47 days. Current record after I tripped over the power cable: 0 minutes. Learning Docker one broken container at a time.
// 03
Photos I'm happy with
// 04
Notes and updates on new stuff I'm doing
First post. Why this site exists, what I'll be posting about, and a small promise to my future self.
The story of this website — the stack, the mistakes, the 2 AM deletion incident, and why the admin panel is my favourite part.
// 05
Stuff I use — no certificates, just curiosity
4 in the rotation
4 in the rotation
5 in the rotation
// 06
How I ended up here — a short timeline
2010 —
where the curiosity started
It was slow, it was loud, and I took it apart more times than anyone appreciated. That's roughly when I learned that breaking things is just learning with extra steps.
2018 —
the photography bug
A hand-me-down with one working lens and a shutter that stuck sometimes. I shot terrible photos of everything for months. Some of them are still my favourites.
2021 —
one index.html at a time
My first page was a disaster of marquee tags and broken images, and I was ridiculously proud of it. Still get that exact feeling every time something I build actually works.
2025 — Present
current obsession
Designed it, animated it, wired the database, wrote the words. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a project and became the place I put things I make.
still going// 07
Where to find me online
Want to talk cameras, code, self-hosting, or the best short-eats spot on the island? My inbox is open. No pitch required — nice strangers are welcome too.
Send an email▸ usually replies within a day or two — no promises