Bulela Tshulisi

01Now

South Africa

人

Bulela Tshulisi

RoleSoftware Engineer & Builder

I build software, products, and experiments around AI, learning, and the web.

View my workAbout me
Current focus

Java/Spring backend engineer by profession. Building Guessor, Axioms, Arkly and whatever idea refuses to leave me alone.

02Selected work03 plates

Products I am building.

01Guessor2025—

Guessor

A social geography game built around places, photos and people.

Guessor / 2025—
Index
01
Year
2025—
Stack
Next.js / TypeScript / Spring Boot / PostgreSQL / Cloudflare R2 / Leaflet

Create a challenge from a real photograph, keep the true location private, and see who can tell where it was taken.

Most location games ask you to recognise the world through Street View. Guessor starts from a photograph someone actually took. The picture is the prompt. The map is the argument. The people you play with are the point.

Case studyLive product

02Axioms2025—

Axioms

A mastery-first mathematics learning platform with procedurally generated problems.

Axioms / 2025—
Index
02
Year
2025—
Stack
Next.js / Spring Boot / PostgreSQL / OpenAI

The platform should take responsibility for helping a learner reach mastery, rather than simply presenting content and moving on.

Axioms treats a mathematical idea as something you can actually finish learning. Concepts are scoped on purpose. Problems are generated so that practice covers the idea, not a memorised worksheet. The software keeps going until the learner can do the work, not until the chapter ends.

Case studyView project

03Arkly2026—

Arkly

A personal media archive designed around actually enjoying the things you've saved.

Arkly / 2026—
Index
03
Year
2026—
Stack
Flutter / Dart / Spring Boot

A mobile-first archive for photos and videos, built so stored media is easy to revisit rather than lost in generic cloud storage.

Saving a picture is easy. Seeing it again, on purpose, with some pleasure, is not. Arkly is a personal archive for the photos and videos already on a phone, designed around looking rather than uploading into a pile.

Case study

03Engineering

Building software that has to keep working.

I work primarily on backend systems, integrations and production software using Java and Spring.

The professional work is less about a stack list and more about a habit: take an ambiguous system, find the real constraint, and change it without breaking what already depends on it. The notes below are themes rather than a resume. Employer systems stay unnamed on purpose.

  1. Backend systemsJava and Spring services that sit in the middle of real work.
  2. Large-file architectureFiles that are too big to pretend they are JSON.
  3. Production debuggingMost failures do not live in one process.
  4. AI integrationsModels are useful when they have a job and a place to put the answer.

Engineering notes

04Thinking

Notes, still being written.

All writing

05About

Engineer by trade. Builder by habit.

I am a software engineer and independent builder interested in AI, learning, software products, and what happens when making software gets cheap enough for one person to ship the thing.

More about me

06Contact

Have something interesting in mind?Get in touch.