Kasun Wijayamanna

I am Kasun Wijayamanna. I run HELLO PEOPLE, a software and AI development team based in Perth, Western Australia. What we build is usually the thing that fixes the software you already run, so it stops costing you time and money.

I did not start in software. My first career was as an Accountant. Two years into it I realised the interesting part of every business I looked at was the code that ran it, so I stopped auditing systems and started writing them. That was more than twenty years ago. I have been building software for a living ever since.

What HELLO PEOPLE actually does

Over 100 projects sit behind the company now. That has meant integrating MYOB, Xero, Simpro, ServiceM8, HubSpot, and Salesforce without spreadsheets or double entry in between. Building custom applications for mining contractors, healthcare networks, legal firms, sporting clubs, hospitality groups, and small trades businesses. Migrating legacy platforms into modern web apps without losing years of historical data or breaking end-of-year reporting. Standing up AI systems that answer questions from a business's own documents instead of guessing.

The pattern is always the same. Something is not quite working, or it is working but not scaling, or it is working but nobody can see across it any more. Our job is to make it precise again, without ripping out the parts that already work.

The research side

Alongside the client work I am a Higher Degree by Research postgraduate at Curtin University in Perth, focused on Artificial Intelligence and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Retrieval-Augmented Generation is a technique that lets an AI answer questions from a specific set of trusted documents you provide, rather than letting the model make things up. It is one of the most useful ideas in applied AI right now, and it is what makes AI safe enough to put in front of a compliance officer or a paying customer.

The research keeps me at the front of what actually works in AI. The client work keeps the research honest about what businesses actually need.

The unusual background

Before Perth I worked in Bangkok, Thailand for several years. I also hold an MBA in Oil and Gas. That combination, the international operator's view, the financial discipline of accounting, and two decades of production software, is not a common one. It is what lets me sit in a room with a business owner, an accountant, and an operations manager, and translate cleanly between all three.

It also means I am comfortable talking about a budget, a P&L, a supplier contract, and a database schema in the same conversation. That is often the conversation that decides whether a software project survives its first year.

Perth, family, community

I live in Perth with my wife Sony and our two sons, Talin and Rivin. Perth is the reason HELLO PEOPLE exists in the shape it does. The Western Australian economy runs on mining, resources, trades, and small-to-mid businesses that need software as reliable as a diesel motor. That is the kind of software I like building.

I have been involved with the Rotary Club of Booragoon for over a decade, including a term as President. I was recognised with the Paul Harris Fellow award for the community service work. I also support local community football (soccer) and cricket, and I do most of my thinking on the golf course or on weekend drives out of the city.

How I work with clients

When you engage HELLO PEOPLE, the person answering your first call is me, not an account manager. Scoping is done directly with me. Prices are fixed and written down before work starts. Delivery is measured in on-time sprints, not open-ended timelines. That is not a marketing promise. It is the reason I started the company after twenty years of watching agencies optimise for the contract instead of the outcome.

My work sits at the intersection of AI research, software engineering, and the operational reality of running a business. If any of the three matter to what you are building, we can probably help.

Where to read more of how I think

I write regularly on the HELLO PEOPLE blog and knowledge base about what I actually see inside the businesses I work with. Real migrations, real integration failures, real AI projects that either delivered or did not, and why. If you want a sense of how I approach problems before you ever email me, start there.