Gaveen Prabhasara

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Gaveen Prabhasara de Silva, a sysadmin, programming language tourist, and petty dabbler of the written word. Some people know me as a technologist, some as a poet/writer, some as an artist, and some as a tinkerer—all valid aspects of my life. I am also neurodivergent and a father.

My areas of interest include systems engineering, writing, music, craftsmanship/DIY, open source, science/technology, anime, mycology, and cooking—among other things. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m good at them, just that I’m interested in them. It also doesn’t mean my interest in something is for its conventional usage. For instance, I’m fascinated by all sorts of polearms, even though I’m a pacifist. I like making all kinds of mechanical keyboards but only like using ergonomic builds. But I digress.

Project Mayavee

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Mayavee is a humble little idea that—driven by its values—smaller-scale research with a practical approach can effect meaningful improvements.

Mayavee both encompasses ideas to explore and the values to explore them with. The inspiration behind Mayavee is that positive impact may come from the most humble of circumstances.

In addition, I rely on Mayavee Values as my guiding values whenever I create a new project venture that I feel worthy of exploration.

Project Asura

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I started Asura Linux as a new Open Source project to experiment with different ways of building and running modern general-purpose Linux systems—and to share what we learn along the way.

In other words, I want to experiment with different ways of building and running Linux systems. My reasoning is simple—I want to build the Linux user experience I want to use.

While the “what I want to use” is always a moving target, there have been enough exciting recent developments in the Linux world that shed preconceived notions about how Linux distributions are put together.

Blog Navigation & RSS Feeds

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Links and RSS Feeds

Since this site is generated with Hugo, RSS feeds should be supported everywhere. All you have to do is to append a /index.xml to the URL of a relevant section.

Section	Link	RSS Feed
Main	gaveen.me	https://gaveen.me/index.xml
Sections	Blog Posts	https://gaveen.me/posts/index.xml
	About	https://gaveen.me/about/index.xml
	Facets	https://gaveen.me/facets/index.xml
Categories	Tech	https://gaveen.me/categories/tech/index.xml
	Update	https://gaveen.me/categories/update/index.xml
	Opinion	https://gaveen.me/categories/opinion/index.xml
	Prose	https://gaveen.me/categories/prose/index.xml
	Poetry	https://gaveen.me/categories/poetry/index.xml
	Musing	https://gaveen.me/categories/musing/index.xml
	Remembering	https://gaveen.me/categories/remembering/index.xml
	Personal	https://gaveen.me/categories/personal/index.xml
Tags	#Vim	https://gaveen.me/tags/vim/index.xml
(e.g.,)	#Open Source	https://gaveen.me/tags/open-source/index.xml

The list of tags are non-exhaustive. If you have a particular tag you’d like to explore, you can use the following syntax to deduce the link and RSS feed of that particular tag.

Welcome, Again

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Guess who’s back, back again? Sorry to dissapoint you. It’s just me.

I just posted an update on my side project, Asura Linux:

What happened

Despite my claims not to, due to my eagerness to have a functional desktop UX sooner, I ended up trying to build a usable distro. I could have gone the Atomic/Universal Blue approach, but that wasn’t exactly what I wanted. Since I wasn’t trying to adjust an existing flavor to taste or attempt to write my own full-featured Wayland compositor, I was trying to do too much too early. For example, building packages from source and generating custom ISOs was a lot of work—even without spending any real innovation tokens yet. This quickly became a bottleneck due to two personal reasons.

Neurodiversity

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We, humanity, have come a long way to celebrate the diversity in our world. While it’s not all great—some people still like to use differences to “other” people and cause pain, harm, and even death—we’ve generally progressed to a point where such intentions don’t go unchallenged. We have taken a long time to understand that we are better together, not the same. While dragging our feet all that way, we are still making progress.

It's been a while

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, it’s been a while. How have you been? Four years is a long time.

In my defense, a lot happened in those four years. There are already a million posts and podcasts about what the world went through during that time. There are at least a few about what people in Sri Lanka had to deal with. So, I won’t go there. At least not now.

At the moment, all I want to say is, here I am now. I want to write more often. Scratch that. I certainly want to post more often. I do write often. Just not the kind of thing I feel most would find interesting enough to read. In my past blog configuration, I had to complete several manual steps to publish a post after I was done writing. While it wasn’t particularly taxing, it usually became the straw that broke the back of the camel that was a new blog post. I can’t recall how many posts I left as drafts and eventually discarded.

My Setup: ErgoMech Keyboard

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of my hobbies/special interests is Ergonomic Mechanical Keyboards and Keyboard Layouts that go with them. I’ll use this page (soon) as an up-to-date place to explain how I have configured my custom ergonomic keyboard setup.

ID75

Until this page is ready, I’ll link the GitHub repo with my custom keyboard configuration.

My Setup: Text Editor

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the future, I might keep an up-to-date page here explaining my text editor configuration (including plugin selection), both for posterity and as a hopefully helpful source of information.

Vim

Vim has been my preferred text editor for a long time. Since there is already a reasonably detailed blog post, I’ll point to it until there is a significant change.

Neovim

Neovim is a more modernized variation of Vim (kind of like how Vim was an upgrade to Vi). I use Neovim (nvim) as my preferred coding editor since is has everything Vim has and much more. For example, better syntax handling, better Language Server Protocol (LSP) and Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) client integration, better code completion, etc.

My vim story

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Once you have used ’notepad.exe,’ you have used all text editors—they said. A text editor is a text editor is a text editor—they said. After the first few years of running Linux/Unix professionally, I had subconsciously almost agreed with this idea, even though I knew Vim—more accurately, I thought I knew Vim. But when other people who actually knew how to use Vim used it, Vim still looked like magic.

If you have worked in a command line at some point, I am sure you can appreciate the wisdom of learning how to use a text editing program properly. On Unix/Linux command lines, text is king. Therefore, learning how to manipulate text effectively goes a long way for your productivity. If you can open a file and edit its content, it enables you to configure your system.

Curtain call: Jayalath Manorathna

Sun, 12 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There are moments in life you lucidly remember when the gears of cause and action in a chaotic universe turn, something clicks into place, and your life changes forever. If you are lucky—like I was—the changes it brings about can be positive and profound.

Somewhere in the late ’90s, I was a teenager trying to traverse self-expression while trying to balance creative life and …life. It was not a fight I felt was going my way. On one such humid evening, I found myself sitting in the main hall of our school with a few friends, watching a ‘stage drama’—which is what a traveling theater production is called locally—named “ගුරු තරුව.”

I don't believe in Kubernetes

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was always a believer in Cloud Computing. Even when some “big executives” called it a fad, I still believed in the cloud—or its promise.

The belief itself is not an achievement. As with so many other people in tech, it spoke to me from a place of understanding. It was not so much an achievement to be had. We may not have called it a cloud, but when Amazon opened the gates of their Web Services to everyone, we saw good things we recognized. We realized it was an opportunity to build better.

The future of networking is software

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I believe the future of networking in the data center is software-based. The water is wet, and thank you for coming to my TED talk.

While what I just mentioned may be obvious to say—given how pretty much everything has its future in software—you would be surprised at the state of the networking industry if you came to it as an outsider. The cloud has already happened, and computing has embraced it with open arms,… tentacles, and whatever else is available. Storage is slower to move but not too far behind. Cloud-scale storage technologies are becoming closer and closer to being commoditized¹. Network—in a way—is the last frontier in the data center that is not yet fully subscribing to cloud ethos.

We are on our own

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m early to work because the roads are mostly empty. That’s not because of an extended holiday season. No, that finished last week. People are trying to stay home because of the Easter Sunday Attacks—they are uncertain where to go from here.

As I type these words away, I’m merely walking distance from Mahawela Gardens, where one gruesome episode of Sunday’s events unfolded. I also hear stories in hushed murmur about colleagues who have lost family members. I think back to the Sunday as it unfolded. I remember holding my baby tightly in my arms while my mind kept repeatedly asking for his forgiveness for the world we have created for his generation.

I thought I knew

Sat, 20 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I thought I knew how being a father would be. I have a father, a good one. I understood that much. I have nephews and nieces, and I love them to bits. I understood that much. So, when we became pregnant, I thought I knew how being a parent felt.

I knew I wasn’t nearly as ready as I wanted, but I didn’t think I had a vast gap in understanding how a father felt about their child. I had experienced a large swath of the human emotion spectrum and gathered a lifetime of experiences. So, I thought I knew how being a father would feel.

Whatever happened to that book?

Sun, 14 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Edit: This post has been slightly updated at the end of 2023 to reflect a more recent status of the writing projects.

Today is the Sinhala (and Tamil) New Year day. As I sit in front of the computer to partake in my trade—as one does according to tradition—I want to try and answer a question.

Whatever happened to that book I was writing? If—for whatever unfathomable reason—you wish to know more about what has been happening with these, you might like this update. Let me start with what is closest to being complete.

What is the meaning of that poem?

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I am a poet, and that much I can say without the uncertainty I allude to in my public bio sections that read “SysAdmin, Programming Language Tourist, and Petty Dabbler of the Written Word”, or my first post here.

My work as a poet or a writer is mainly to write. But, I write mainly for the sheer joy of reading it back in every way I can. Let me explain that a little bit.

Here we go

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Where should I begin? Is this on?

Hello there! Welcome, fellow human beings, and any others reading. This is presumably Gaveen, and—despite all my efforts—you have found my blog. If this is the choice of Steins;Gate, who am I to complain.

There are no grand introductions here nor any roadmaps to unveil—just a realization to be had. The realization that I may have moved my blog again. There is, however, a simple promise to write when I can and enjoy the promise of writing.