Welcome weary internet traveller, you might know me as Shan / solderneer / or if you know me really well Sudharshan Sundaramahlingam.
Evolutionary Purpose: To spread love and optimism by nudging the world towards a path of collective flourishing.
Top of Mind: I’m working on a community-centered approach to preventive healthcare with Happily Ever After.
Chronological is tired. Categorical is wired. I tend to hop around industries and themes, chasing what interdisciplinary problems that span multiple types of work. So, what follows is my life, decomposed into defined and legible categories.
Projects & Products
Health: I’m working on a community health monitoring framework at Happily Ever After. Previously, I worked on a sleep intervention application in collaboration researchers from the NUS Sleep and Cognition Lab.
Space: designed and built a STM32 based cube satellite, for the EG1310 module at the National University of Singapore in 2017. I also gave a short talk about it, at Hackware v3.14.
Robotics: with my friend, Isaac Tay, I worked on a swarm robotics platform called Sentibots. The project was was a finalist in the Singapore Science and Engineering Fair 2016, and was formally published at the IRC-SET 2016 conference.
Embedded Systems: made a custom 16-bit microprocessor on a Xilinx FPGA, complete with its own instruction set architecture. And, as always, talked about this at Hackware. I also worked on automated embedded system verification and testing pipelines for warehouse robots at Hope Technik.
Security: contributed to a embedded-friendly certificate management system at MicroSec and worked on client side interface design and development for their Intrusion Detection System.
Full-stack Software:
- Built sellingx.io to facilitate peer-to-peer resale of student clubbing tickets alongside Daniel. In 5 days, we had 600 daily active users and moved about 300 pounds of money…. then Stripe deplatformed us for violating their Terms of Service.
- During National Service, I developed military software infrastructure including internal booking/tracking systems and a custom educational platform. Some of the work is ✨ open source ✨.
Tech for good: worked on a sonar powered wearable that uses haptic feedback to help to the visually impaired, during a local hackathon (Hack n Roll).
Misc. projects for fun:
- An FPGA audio synthesiser
- Real time visualization tool for neural network training
- Kerbal Space Program hardware gaming console
Startups
Happily Ever After: researching healthcare systems, and the complex adaptive nature of individual well-being. I haven’t quite formulated how to explain Happily Ever After to people, but the latest attempt is that we are building culture and technology for a network of community-centered health and well-being spaces.
Beep: a voice-first chat application that used AI transcription and voice generation to provide two-way interoperability between audio and text communication. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to get it to scale, but the real alpha was the experience we gained, and the friendships I forged.
Research & Writing
Health & Human Flourishing: interweaving technological, social, cultural, economical, philosophical and spiritual dimensions of delivering holistic healthcare. Unravelling the threads that underpin healthcare coordination failure, and advocating for human-centered sociotechnologies to power the future of human flourishing. I write about this actively on The Pink Zone.
Biotechnology: still fascinated by the civilisational unlock of brain-computer interface tech. Gave a couple of talks on their importance, the OpenBCI platform and its limitations.
Education: spent 6 months deeply exploring alternate realities around preserving meaning in educational systems, a preference for academies over universities and protocols to encourage life-long learning. During this time, I built knowledge graphs, a digital microuniversity, and a thought-apprentice matching system. Wrote about some of the ideas here, here and here. Done in collaboration and with support from Audacity, a Singapore based impact collective.
Some of my hits that I’m especially proud of:
tldr: read my work in 📝 Feed, The Pink Zone and Makerforce
Communities
President of UCL Entrepreneurs: a student society with over 1000 ambitious members who are passionate about pursuring entrepreneurship as a career.
Community Steward at Audacity: an impact collective based in Singapore which focuses on a values-based culture to solve issues in communities, food, energy, work, education, healthcare and urbanisation.
Kernel Block 7 Fellow at Kernel: a peer-to-peer lifelong network of awesome individuals building and learning about web3.
Cohort 2 at Colony DAO Club: a group of active DAO builders working on using organizational technology to solve civic problems.
Founding member at Makerforce: a small collective of developers, makers and thinkers from NUS High School, who love to build stuff.
Personal Culture
Words: I read like literally everything. Favourite blogs include Astral Codex Ten, Not Boring, Ex Urbe, Ribbonfarm, Subpixel Space. Favourite books include “Godel, Escher, Bach”, Braiding Sweetgrass, Reinventing Organizations, and Thinking Fast and Slow. Meander through what I’ve read, in my 📚 Library.
Coffee: Training to be an amateur barista, one pour at a time. I’m not going anywhere without my Baratza Encore, Aeropress and a bag of kiss the hippo’s George Street Blend.
Fitness and Longevity: I dealt with an eating disorder as a teenager, and so I care very deeply about the well-being of my mind, body and soul. I do regular calisthenics, stick to a 16-8 intermittent fast and try my best to eat foods that are full of life (a hard ask for a student).
and just to top it off, I also play chess badly (1200 ELO), watch lots of trashy romantic comedies, and occasionally write poetry.