TalentHub

What it is

The platform Sri Lanka Telecom Mobitel runs its trainee programme on. In production. Built by twenty developers over a year.

This is employment, not a personal repository. There is no public link and I am not going to invent one. The technologies listed above are the parts I worked in, not the whole platform’s stack.

Why it exists

A trainee programme at this size has to track things that do not survive in a spreadsheet: daily logbooks that someone has to actually read, attendance taken two different ways, seat allocation across a floor plan, and submission deadlines that have to respect public holidays to mean anything.

TalentHub is where all of that lives.

My position on it

Largest contributor: 207 of 652 commits, and 37 pull requests merged to main. The next highest contributor has 94. I rebuilt the interface across 27 of the 35 screens, covering both the trainee portal and the admin console.

The hard problem

Most of the work was not any single feature. It was that a platform built by twenty people over a year accumulates duplicate answers to the same question, and duplicates diverge.

Working-day and holiday calculations existed in more than one place. So did the definition of an overdue submission. Two different screens did the same attendance job.

The decisions

AI logbook validation, built end to end

Local heuristic scoring runs first, and the Google Gemini API is only called when the heuristics cannot settle it. Errors are handled fail-closed, with request diagnostics. Inference is debounced off the typing path at 2.5 seconds.

The design point worth stating plainly: the feature degrades instead of breaking when the API is unavailable. A trainee filling in a logbook does not get a blocked form because a third-party service is having a bad afternoon.

I later migrated to a lighter model to stay inside the daily rate limit.

Compliance logic consolidated into one module

Working-day and holiday calculations were duplicated. I moved them into a shared module and standardised how overdue submissions are identified across the backend, behind a verification script.

The module is imported by five controllers and four services. That is the real number.

The 96-seat reservation map

A custom pan-and-zoom hook, touch support and auto-fit scaling. The previous implementation could not be operated on a phone, which matters when most of the people using it are holding one.

Two attendance interfaces merged into one

Facial recognition and QR scanning had separate screens doing the same job. Consolidating them removed a duplicated code path and a second route through the same task.

Seven animated seasonal login themes

Vesak, Poson, Deepavali, Sinhala and Tamil New Year, Halloween and Christmas, with a backend switch. Minor engineering. Genuinely liked, and specific to the people who actually use the thing.

What I would do differently

I chose the Gemini model before I checked the daily rate limit, and had to migrate to a lighter one afterwards. The limit was published. Reading it first would have cost ten minutes and saved the migration.

The compliance duplication had been there a while before I consolidated it, and I had already added code near it more than once without noticing. I would now go looking for the second copy of a rule before writing against the first.