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 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.

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. I was young, the web was younger. Windows 98, Netscape Navigator, the screech of a 56k modem. It was magic. I didn't know it then, but that moment set the direction for the next three decades of my life.

2000s

Finding My Voice

I discovered you could publish on the internet, not just consume, but create. I started a blog called HTNet, powered by PHP-Nuke. I hand-coded PHP, tweaked templates, and wrote about technology because I couldn't not write about it. I built a career as an Analyst Programmer (PHP, SQL Server, VBA, Crystal Reports), learning the web from the ground up.

2010s

The Silence

And then I stopped. The blog posts became less frequent. The experiments slowed down. Life happened: career demands, family responsibilities. By the mid-2010s, HTNet was dormant. Eventually, I let the domain expire. My digital ghost lives on, haunting the web with familiar themes.

2023

The Return

At an age when most people think about slowing down, I enrolled in a Bachelor of Information Technology programme at Open University Malaysia. Not a career move, a choice. After 20+ years of learning on the job, I wanted to formalise my knowledge. I expect to complete my degree around 2028. I'm playing the long game.

2025

The Awakening

I discovered AI-assisted coding, and it was a genuine awakening. After decades writing code line by line, the ability to describe what I wanted and have an AI partner generate the implementation felt like discovering fire. I started running local LLMs, GGUF-quantized models on my own hardware. No API dependencies. No subscription fees.

2026

Building Again

Experiments became projects. Projects became products. brl-subagent, Private AI Roleplay, Spelling Bee, each one a learning exercise, each one pushing me into unfamiliar territory. New frameworks. New architectures. New ways of thinking about how software should work.

"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