Rahmatyana : An Epic of Code, Courage & the Search for Love

How isolation, technology, and an ancient myth taught meto speak, bloom, and love again

The Ramayana tells of Rama crossing oceans, battling demons, and traversing impossible distances to find his beloved Sita. My journey was less mythic — and somehow harder. It crossed the quiet devastation of 1.5 years of isolation, a dating app dashboard, a flower market at 6am, and eventually, the pages of The Straits Times.

I call it Rahmatyana — my own unfinished epic, still being written.

The Isolation That Silenced Me

After 1.5 years largely cut off from the world — navigating a harrowing harassment situation, legal disputes, professional turbulence — I had lost something I didn't expect to lose: my voice. Not literally, but the capacity to be comfortable in front of another human being. The muscle memory of small talk. The confidence to look someone in the eye and simply say, "Hi, I'm Rahmat."

Public speaking coaches will tell you confidence is built on a stage. My stage turned out to be something far more humbling: a 5-inch phone screen, a few curated photos, and a bio I rewrote seventeen times.

The Algorithm as a Dojo

I made a decision that, in retrospect, was both absurd and brilliant: I would use dating apps not primarily to find a partner, but to learn how to speak again. To practice being present. To recover the art of holding a conversation with a stranger who had no reason to be kind to me.

As someone who lives and breathes technology — co-founding Infraloka, building cloud infrastructure, writing code — I approached it as an SRE would approach a failing system: systematically, iteratively, with logs. Each conversation was a sprint. Each silence I filled was a bug I patched. Each "good morning" I forced myself to type was a deployment that didn't crash.

What I didn't expect was that the apps would work — not as a matchmaker, but as a rehabilitation chamber for human connection. Three months in, I noticed something had shifted. I could hold a conversation. I could listen. I could share. The isolation's fog was beginning to lift.

Bumble Bot RS — my own desktop tool — used zero-shot image classification on profile photos, cross-referenced against a handcrafted keyword set representing what I was genuinely looking for: intellectual curiosity, warmth, creativity, faith-adjacent values.

Profiles that passed the threshold got a right swipe. Those that didn't, didn't.

But here's what people miss: the bot didn't choose anyone. It filtered signal from noise. Once a match happened, I reviewed every single one manually.

And for replies? I integrated Sahabat-AI, a language model fine-tuned for Bahasa Indonesia — because language is culture, and culture is everything. Responding in a way that felt native, warm, and unforced matters infinitely more than being grammatically correct in a foreign register. It is assisted reply not automatic, the purpose is to make me the user know how to properly answer woman's question without being a dry texter.

The bot handled volume. I handled meaning.

This is not so different from how we use CRMs in sales, or recommendation engines in product design. The technology didn't replace human judgment — it protected my attention so I could spend it where it mattered.

Becoming Shah Rukh Khan (Sort Of)

Shah Rukh Khan — India's King of Romance — built an empire on one idea: that love deserves a grand gesture. I am an engineer from Bandung with an ITB degree and a Flipper Zero, but somewhere in the Rahmatyana, I decided: if I was going to find love, I was going to pursue it with the same totality I bring to everything else I care about.

So I did things that didn't compute on my usual spreadsheets. I took a dance class — something I would have laughed at my 2022-self for. I learned to sing, badly at first, then less badly. Not for performance. For joy. For the physical experience of expressing something inward outward.

The Florist

Here is something no LinkedIn post about scaling infrastructure will tell you: standing in a flower market at dawn, trying to understand the difference between peonies and ranunculus, will teach you more about attention than any leadership course.

I became, briefly and earnestly, a florist — or at least someone who tried to be one. I wanted to give flowers that were chosen, not grabbed from a vending machine at a petrol station. I learned about seasonal blooms, about water temperature, about how a stem cut at the right angle lasts days longer. It was slow, deliberate, analog work — the opposite of everything I do professionally.

And it was deeply, unexpectedly, healing. It reminded me that love is tended, not just declared. That care has texture and scent and time baked into it.

The Straits Times Moment

I did not expect Singapore's newspaper of record to enter my love story. And yet.

When The Straits Times featured my search — a young Indonesian tech founder, documenting an unconventional quest for partnership that blended ancient Javanese storytelling, modern dating technology, and a kind of radical earnestness — it was surreal. A private odyssey, suddenly in print.

The Public Stage

Somewhere between the dating apps, the flower market, the dance lessons and the Bollywood reruns, something extraordinary happened: I could speak in public again.

Not just speak — command a room. The same person who had retreated from human contact now stood at conferences, at forums, at government-linked events, presenting ideas he believed in with a clarity and warmth he hadn't had before.

Because it turned out the muscle you use to connect with a stranger on a screen at 11pm, hoping they'll respond — that muscle, when trained daily, becomes the muscle you use to hold a room at 2pm. Vulnerability scales. Presence is transferable.

Rama is Still Searching

The Ramayana ends with a reunion. The Rahmatyana is still in progress.

I haven't found my Sita yet. But I have found something I lost — myself. The ability to be in a room and feel at ease. To crack a joke without rehearsing it. To say "I'm nervous" and keep going anyway. To send flowers to someone just because the season felt right.

If you are reading this from a place of isolation — professional, emotional, social — I want you to know this: the path back to other people can look stranger than you expect. It might look like opening an app you feel too proud for. It might look like a bad first dance class. It might look like buying flowers for yourself first, just to practice.

Technology doesn't dehumanize us. We dehumanize us. And we can use the same tools — with intention and humility — to find our way back.

This is Rahmatyana. An unfinished epic. Rahmatan lil alamin — a mercy for all creation — beginning, as always, with the mercy we extend to ourselves.

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