Ventures

Founder, Software Engineer, Author

Dayyan James (DJ) is a Singapore-based founder, software engineer, and author. He runs CocosBotanica, a luxury botanical skincare and scent house; Spwig, the open-source Django e-commerce platform that powers it; and DJ-AI, his machine-learning research lab. He also wrote Operating System Unknown, a memoir of late-diagnosed ADHD that draws on the same decade of building these companies.

Spwig

Open-source Django e-commerce platform, released under AGPL-3.0.

Spwig is a modern, open-source e-commerce platform built on Django and PostgreSQL, released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. It was originally built to run CocosBotanica in production, and has since grown into a general-purpose commerce stack designed for founders and small engineering teams who want to own their storefront end-to-end rather than rent it from a SaaS. The core is deliberately Django-native — the same admin, ORM, and template system Django developers already know — extended with a headless API, a modular checkout, and a plugin architecture for payments, shipping, and tax.

The platform is developed in the open at github.com/Spwig, and the parent company is SPWIG PTE. LTD., based in Singapore. Spwig also incubates a family of vertical products built on the same core:

  • medical.spwig.com — commerce for regulated medical and pharmaceutical products, with compliance-aware workflows.

  • emergent.spwig.com — experimental and emerging-market storefront patterns.

  • measurement.spwig.com — first-party analytics and attribution for Spwig stores, built to work without third-party cookies.

  • Website: spwig.com

  • Source code: github.com/Spwig

  • License: AGPL-3.0

  • Stack: Django, Python, PostgreSQL

CocosBotanica

Luxury botanical skincare and scent, made in Singapore.

CocosBotanica is a luxury skincare and fragrance brand rooted in the botany of the tropics. The house makes small-batch scents, body oils, and skincare from cold-pressed and steam-distilled botanicals — with a bias toward the plants of Southeast Asia — and sells direct-to-consumer through its own storefront. CocosBotanica is the flagship customer of the Spwig platform, and the two companies are developed in tandem: features shipped for CocosBotanica generally end up upstream in Spwig.

DJ-AI

Machine-learning research on attention, perception, and neurodivergent cognition.

DJ-AI is Dayyan’s applied machine-learning research lab. Current work centres on multi-stage training for vision models — instinctive, attention, and higher-order reasoning heads — and on architectures inspired by how neurodivergent brains actually allocate attention. The lab is a personal research vehicle rather than a client-services shop; published notes, experiments, and papers live at the site below.

Operating System Unknown (the book)

A memoir of late-diagnosed ADHD — the bridge between all of the above.

Operating System Unknown: Debugging a Life After Forty is Dayyan’s memoir of receiving an ADHD diagnosis at forty-three, after two decades of building companies without knowing why his brain worked the way it did. The book weaves through the founding stories of both CocosBotanica and Spwig, and reframes the entrepreneurship as a lifelong workaround for an operating system nobody had labelled yet. It’s the natural entry point for anyone who wants the why behind the ventures.

Elsewhere on the web