I am a developer from Rasht, on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, most at home on the backend. My working hours go into web products at @Jangal, mostly Django and Python. My open source hours go somewhere narrower: making sure my mother tongue, Gilaki, survives in software.
Gilaki is a Caspian language with millions of speakers and almost no digital footprint. No locale. No dictionary API. No calendar library. No word list. So I have been building those, one at a time, since 2020.
The Dilami calendar is the traditional solar calendar of Gilan. Gilaki is the language spoken around it. Neither had usable software, so here is the toolkit:
- Top 1000 Words in Gilaki · the core word list with English and Farsi translations, as JSON, XML, CSV, SQLite and PDF. Searchable at Gil1000.ir
- Awesome Gilaki · a map of every Gilaki software project that exists, and every gap still waiting for someone to fill it
- python-dilami-calendar · Dilami ⇄ Jalali date conversion for Python
- php-dilami-calendar · the same, for PHP
- Dilami-Calendar-C++ · .NET · Arduino · the same for everything else, down to microcontrollers
- Dilami Leap Years · every Dilami leap year from 200 to 3000, listed at giltime.ir
- glk_IR · an attempt to get Gilaki into Linux as a real system locale
- countries-gilaki · country names in Gilaki
- Gilaki Dictionary · the dictionary built on top of the word list
If you speak Gilaki, or write code, or both, then Awesome-Gilaki is the best place to start. The open items there are real and unclaimed.
For the Persian speaking web
- Shelem Scoreboard · a scoreboard for Shelem (شلم), the Persian trick taking card game. It tracks the declarer and contract of every hand and works out the totals, the point difference and the winner. Plain JavaScript, no dependencies, no build step and no external requests, playable at lordarma.com/shelem
- Negaresh · a WordPress plugin that quietly fixes Farsi typography: ZWNJ, spacing, and the usual half space sins
- Iranian League Table · Persian Gulf League and Azadegan League standings as a WordPress widget
- Iran Football Leagues · logos and assets for every Iranian club
- whmcs-jTelegramAdmin · run WHMCS from a Telegram MiniApp
Products and platforms
At Jangal I build KadoosOnline, a Persian language marketplace for live online classes, live since August 2026. Instructors teach over BigBlueButton, and learners find a class, pay for it and sit their exams without anybody on staff touching the transaction. It runs on Django and DRF, Nuxt 3, PostgreSQL, Celery, Redis and Docker. It was built for the Kadoos institute, which has two branches in Rasht, as a third branch that serves the whole country without a building. Around it sit internal CRM and logging services, and KadoosDrawing, a fully offline Persian desktop app that runs the live prize draws at Kadoos events.
Inside the institute itself I run the IT department of the Lakani branch, which also means designing courses, choosing the technology we teach and solving whatever technical problems the place runs into.
Desktop, hardware and experiments
- DNS on Tray · switch your Windows DNS from the system tray with one click
- Binary Clock · Laser Harp · Arduino, for the joy of it
- My Cloud of Words · word clouds that actually render Gilaki, Farsi and Arabic correctly
- What if Iran's election was like the US? · an electoral college thought experiment, in Python
Writing
I blog in Persian at lordarma.com, mostly about the things above: why Gilan and Rasht are worth learning to program in, how the Iranian web holds up when the internet does not, and whatever I have just finished building. I also report football at @VareshSport, where the tooling is open too.
- 🌐 lordarma.com
- ✉️ Arma@Jangal.co
- 🌲 @Jangal · my company
- ⚽ @VareshSport · football, the other obsession
Open to interesting work. Especially interested if it touches minority languages, Gilaki tooling, or anything that makes the Caspian a little louder on the internet.