Isala Piyarisi

Building Platforms · K8s & sometimes GPUs

A cute golden retriever

I've been building since I was 9, starting with selling modded game CDs at school for snack money. Ran COD4 servers for 85,000+ players, shipped Enki (1,200+ users) and TopPics (~100 users), now building Forge, a batteries-included SaaS framework. By day I work on eBPF-powered observability at WSO2. By night I build the tools I wish existed.

→the long version

listening to

The Scientist

Coldplay
powered by

Brown's Tea

Kahata on repeat
watching

Dr. Stone

10 billion percent
building

Forge

SaaS framework in Rust
obsessed with

eBPF

kernel tracing magic
setup

macOS + Zed

no mouse gang

Experience

Senior Software Engineer

WSO2

working on eBPF-powered observability for developer platforms

Feb 2024 — now
Google Summer of Code Student

SUSE

built a Kubernetes operator for debugging logging pipelines

Jun 2021 — Aug 2021
Software Engineering Consultant

ThinkSmart Solutions

helped the team scale while I figured out my thesis

Jul 2021 — Jun 2022
Founder & Sysadmin

Black Assassins E-Sport

COD4 servers that stayed up when everyone else's got DDoS'd

Mar 2014 — Jun 2020
→all experience

Writing

→all writing

"Make it work, make it right, make it fast."

— Kent Beck

Talks

→all talks

Projects

Tera

Local-first AI assistant that runs entirely on your device. Built with Rust because I wanted AI that doesn't send my data to the cloud. Uses RAG for long-term memory.

★ 87
Enki

Intelligent bookmarking app that uses AI to organize and surface saved content. 1,200+ users across web and iOS, 170+ monthly active users. Started as a personal tool for managing research notes, now used by people with 700+ saved assets each.

TopPics

Chrome extension that uses on-device AI to find and remove duplicate photos from Google Photos. 80+ users, freemium model with paid tier. Shipped to Chrome Web Store and Product Hunt. Built because I hit 94% storage and no existing tool worked without uploading my photos to someone else's server.

★ 0
Forge

Batteries-included framework for shipping SaaS without drowning in infrastructure. Auth, jobs, workflows, rate limiting, observability, idempotency out of the box. Write your business logic in Rust, Forge generates type-safe Svelte clients with realtime updates.

★ 0
→all projects

Notes

→all notes

Activity

GitHub contribution graph for isala404
SCORE: 0 LIVES: ♥♥♥
Bug Hunter
squash the bugs before they reach you
[SPACE] to start
[A/D] move · [SPACE] shoot
[A] left · [D] right · [SPACE] shoot

About Isala Piyarisi

Builder and platform engineer with a track record of shipping products from scratch and seeing them through to scale. Works across the full stack from kernel to user interface.

AI & Machine Learning

Builds AI infrastructure and local-first AI systems. Experience with PyTorch, ML pipelines, RAG architectures, vector databases, and GPU orchestration. Created Tera, a local-first AI assistant built with Rust. Passionate about privacy-preserving AI that runs on-device.

Technical Range

Work spans: AI Infrastructure (local LLMs, ML pipelines, RAG, PyTorch), Platform Engineering (Kubernetes, observability, service mesh, GPU orchestration), and Systems (eBPF, Rust, Go, Linux internals).

Founder Mindset

Founded and ran a gaming community for 6 years, building infrastructure that served thousands of users. Built observability tools now used by developers daily. Approaches problems end-to-end, from design to production to on-call. Prefers building solutions over talking about them.

Current Work

Senior Software Engineer at WSO2, building Choreo developer platform. Architected eBPF-powered observability processing 500GB/day. Led Cilium CNI migration on 10,000+ pod cluster. Speaker at Conf42, KCD, and cloud-native events.