Teaching Networking, DevOps and ML in Sinhala

Many Sri Lankan students understand networking or DevOps concepts far faster when they're explained in Sinhala than from an English-only textbook. Often the concept isn't the barrier — the language is.

Three projects in this portfolio are my answer — interactive learning hubs where the explanation comes in the language you think in.

Data Communication & Networking Hub

An interactive hub with a network design workbook, a TCP/IP model simulator and a full Sinhala study guide, covering packet routing, CIDR/VLSM, the OSI layers and the devices (routers, switches, repeaters, bridges).

The bitwise subnet visualiser is the piece that clicks for people. Slide a CIDR prefix from /8 to /30 and the 32-bit address re-renders with network bits and host bits in different colours, alongside the mask, the network and broadcast addresses and the usable host count. Subnetting stops being a formula and becomes a picture.

192.168.10.77/26
11000000.10101000.00001010.01|001101
└────────── network (26) ──────┘└host┘
mask 255.255.255.192 · network .64 · broadcast .127 · 62 usable hosts

Bilingual by design. DHCP's four-way handshake, NAT port forwarding and ARP tables are explained in Sinhala first, with the English terms kept intact — because the exam and the job are in English.

W3DevOps — a handbook from real labs

W3DevOps is a W3Schools-style portal I built while learning DevOps: 27 chapters across 7 tracks (Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, production web, Coolify), 136 screenshots from the labs, a live terminal simulator, a searchable 70-command cheat sheet and a 25-question exam. It's 100% static HTML/CSS/JS — it can be hosted on S3 + CloudFront for fractions of a cent.

The deliberate choice was to keep real failures in: SSH authentication errors, firewall permission denials, container crash loops. Clean tutorials teach the happy path; screenshots of errors teach you what you'll actually see.

The whole handbook is now on this site as the DevOps series, and the Self Guide turns it into a step-by-step learning path.

SRE workbook — Sinhala labs for hard topics

The SRE practical workbook has 20 labs with XP and levels, explained bilingually: Lab 01 starts at hardware, kernel space, user space and syscalls, and the track builds up to Docker deep dives and incident response.

ML Playbook

A curriculum from regression and classification to CNNs, with Jupyter implementations and a live drawing canvas to test an MNIST model with your own mouse or finger. Models are exported to quantised ONNX for in-browser inference, so there's nothing to install.

What I learned building learning tools

1. Interactive beats illustrated. A slider that moves bits teaches more than a diagram of bits.
2. Keep the English terms. Translate the explanation, not the vocabulary people will be tested on.
3. Static is accessible. A static site loads on a phone on a campus data plan; that's the audience.
4. Show the errors. Learners trust material that admits things break.

Browse the education projects →