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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.