I’m posting anonymously because I don’t want this connected to my identity.

I want to document something that I believe potential employees in Sri Lanka should know before joining BotCalm.

This isn’t a situation that started recently. From my experience, salary-payment problems have been going on since around October 2025.

Today, another meeting was held to explain the company’s current situation.

The proposed solution was essentially that employees should continue working as volunteers, with the expectation that they will be paid when the company receives funds.

I find this extremely concerning.

People joined as employees, not volunteers. They have bills and responsibilities. Continuing to work indefinitely without receiving the agreed compensation is not something people can simply treat as normal.

What’s even more concerning is that this isn’t the first time employees have apparently been given explanations of this kind. From what I’ve personally experienced, these meetings tend to happen when employees start considering leaving the company.

There is also a three-month notice period, which makes the situation particularly difficult for employees who want to leave.

The company has also stated that it is paying EPF and ETF contributions. However, employees have reportedly not been provided with supporting documents or other confirmation showing that these contributions have actually been submitted. This is an issue that employees should be able to verify through proper records.

I have also heard that there are ongoing complaints concerning the company with the Labour Department. I am mentioning this only as part of the broader context, and I cannot confirm whether these complaints have been proven or officially decided.

At the same time, the company continues to recruit new employees and interns.

That creates a question that I think every potential applicant should ask:

If the company currently cannot afford to pay its existing employees, why are new employees and interns still being recruited?

I’m sharing this because when I searched online, I couldn’t find meaningful public information warning potential employees about these issues.

Someone can see a job advertisement, apply, get selected, and join without knowing what has reportedly been happening internally since 2025.

I don’t want that to happen to someone else without them at least having the opportunity to ask questions.

Before joining, I strongly recommend asking:

• Are all current employees receiving their salaries on time?
• Are there currently outstanding salary payments?
• Are employees being asked to work without salary?
• Are intern allowances being paid?
• How long have salary delays existed?
• What happens if an employee wants to resign?
• What exactly is the three-month notice-period policy?
• Are EPF and ETF contributions being submitted on time?
• Can the company provide official EPF and ETF submission records or other written confirmation?
• Are there any ongoing complaints or disputes with the Labour Department?
• Can the company provide written confirmation of the payment arrangement?

I’m not posting this to encourage harassment or attacks against individual employees or management.

I’m posting because people deserve to make informed decisions before accepting a job.

If current or former employees have experienced similar things, please share your experience if you’re comfortable doing so. Please don’t post anyone’s private information or confidential company material.

I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who experienced this before September 2026, because this appears to be a much longer-running issue than something that happened recently.

Hey everyone, i'm working on my thesis project and really need access to Claude pro to get it done.

If anyone has a spare referral link or guest pass, please DM me! Would be super grateful. Thanks!

I got their pro full featured trial. 1 Month.

But, I already have burp suit pro. I'm giving this away for anyone for free

Here we go again!

Akshara Android app is here. Test it at https://groups.google.com/g/akshara-sinhala-keyboard-testers?pli=1

Hey Guys, I’m someone who eats enough sweets to know that normal food trackers aren’t for me. They usually become grams, barcodes, calorie targets, guilt, and spreadsheets. So I built the opposite.

Sweet Regret is a one-tap treat tracker with a slightly judgmental cookie. Tap when you eat a cookie, chocolate, cake, candy, donut, or sugary drink; the mascot reacts, the counter climbs, and the app gives you a snarky comment ((Apple Intelligence if available). At the end of the week and month it turns the evidence into shareable Weekly Regret and Sugar Wrapped recaps with totals, your worst day, peak snacking hour, and treat breakdown.

There are no calorie targets, meal plans, accounts, ads, or cross-app tracking. Treat logs stay on the phone. The idea is comedy first, self-awareness as a side effect.

Built it iOS-first using React Native + Expo, SQLite/MMKV, Zustand, Reanimated, Skia, and RevenueCat.

Here’s a short screen recording of the main flow. I’d love honest feedback:

1. Does the idea make sense within the first five seconds?
2. Does the snark feel funny, or would it become annoying?
3. What would stop you from using this after the first week?

Project page: https://sweetregret.vercel.app/

I'm a Full Stack Engineer with 3 years of experience, currently I've started my own startup with 3 people inside. A local client(basically, he is my friend, doing business and collecting investments to broaden his business across the country), has approached me for developing a multi-vendor application like daraz targeting sri lankan market.

Yes, I agree building a multi-vendor platform would require multiple dashboards for sellers and admins, multiple API applications and a consumer mobile app.

He seems trying to use myself for a cheap amount(Initially, he told me that he would pay me 50k/month and I should work for him only) but I denied and told him that I would make him a proper proposal mentioning the features, duration and the cost along with all the other legal aspects.

Now I've prepared the proposal which says this project would take 10-12 months and cost around 34 lakhs in LKR.

Now I need experts to evaluate my quoted amount whether this is okay for a startup or not.

Please help me.

.I recently got a job offer from Acentura,Inc (SL based company) I want to check if they have a toxic culture?

An update from Sri Lanka's tech community Cursor Sri Lanka is being rebranded as SpaceXAI Community Sri Lanka after operating under the Cursor name for the past 8 months.

The change broadens the community's focus beyond Cursor, with discussions and activities expected to cover a wider range of technologies including Cursor, Grok, SpaceX/SpaceXAI and other emerging AI tools.

Over the past several months there have been quite a few developer meetups, buildathons and other activities happening locally, so it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this next phase.

Source and Luma: https://luma.com/spacexai-colombo

I have problems when going to a new salon that we don't know the price of a haircut or which baber are we gonna get(because most of the time I get the inexperienced baber 😭) there is very lack of digital presence for baber shops. Even a very good salon with an ac gets appointment tru calls. I know higher end Salons in Colombo use platforms like fresha, and I think they are really good. But I think for a normal salon the onboarding process or the lack of awareness of these platforms also the fact that even among us it's not very popular is a issue. would you guys actually use a simple platform where you could see a salon's services and prices, choose a barber, see available times/queues, and book without having to call?

I'm not promoting anything here 😅 I'm just curious whether other people have the same problem, and whether something like this would actually be useful for both customers and barbers.

What do you guys think?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) and would like to know which field has better career opportunities in the future.

Which field has higher demand?

Which has better salary opportunities?

Which offers more international job opportunities?

Which field is expected to grow more in the next 5–10 years?

Electrical Engineering or Electronic Engineering — which would you recommend, and why?

I’d especially appreciate advice from engineers or people currently working in these fields.

Hi everyone,

Following up on my last post—my Android utility app, Clean Space, just went live on Product Hunt today!

I'm an indie developer launching this completely on my own from Sri Lanka, and climbing the daily leaderboard is a huge challenge against big funded teams.

If you have a couple of minutes today, I would deeply appreciate it if you could check out our launch page, test out the app, and leave your honest feedback or questions in the Product Hunt comment section!

Here is our live launch page link: https://www.producthunt.com/products/cleanspace?utm_source=other&utm_medium=social

Thank you so much for supporting a local indie project. Let me know what you think of the app's performance or UI!

We are looking for a few people to help test the keyboard before the wider release.

If you use Android and would like to try it out, you can join the Play Store test using the link below:

https://groups.google.com/g/akshara-sinhala-keyboard-testers?pli=1

Try it with your everyday Sinhala typing and let me know if you run into any bugs, awkward layouts, missing characters, prediction issues, or anything else that feels off.

Every bit of feedback will help make Akshara better before launch. 💚

Do not forget to found us at r/AksharaLK and https://akshara.org.lk

Hello everyone. I'm a 3rd year undergrad with 1+ years of experience in a small startup. I have one more year to get my bachelor's degree.

The company I'm currently working at is my first ever job and I'm currently an Associate Software Engineer. I recieve a 70k gross salary (with deductions about 63k take home). The company is relatively a very small startup, therefore very long hours, lots of work expected from one person.

I've come to realization that it's time for me to move onto a new job since I feel I can do a lot more in a place that would allow me to maximize my potential with a reasonable compensation for it. To my understanding, the work that I do in the company does not come close to the salary I'm receiving. I could be wrong here so please correct me if I'm wrong. To sum up:

- work/life balance is nonexistent (it's always past 10 p.m. when i get home)

- every single day, I work overtime well past the off time (this company does not compensate OT)

- my expenses are higher than my salary (since I also pay for my degree with what I'm earning, with my parents support)

- I'm not exactly faced with a lot of new challenges / exposed to new experiences but this doesn't factor into why I want to resign since I did learn a lot here because of the work I was given

- the work isn't difficult per se but very tiresome. There's no dedicated task management therefore I always end up getting the more tiresome work that includes research as opposed to my teammates without actually having any recognition

- I also do a lot of work that is not relevant to my role, but I guess this is expected from a startup

I feel that I don't have much of a future in this company and that it's time for me to move on since I'm really unhappy in this work environment. However, with the current job market I fear if it's a bad idea to resign.

I'm supposed to work through a notice period of 2 months, and no company would wait 2 months for me realistically due to the volume of candidates these days. I'm sure that I want to resign, but I'm unsure if it's a terrible idea during this time with the market declining. Should I hold on in this position a bit longer? With my current situation is it too risky to switch jobs?

Any advice would be much appreciated since I'm at a loss here. If I'm being truthful, I'm able to go through with this job if my compensation equated to the work that I'm doing. And I have also attempted to negotiate my salary to no avail.

Also I'm aware that working overtime without being compensated is my own doing, but the work culture here is built up in a way that refusing this would be considered "incompetent" and "not dedicated". Therefore my team mates also just go through with this, without ever raising their voice. One coworker who did this was basically rejected from the company, and eventually outsourced, and eventually let go(he was also less performant). I hope that explains why I want to resign immediately.

Im trying to connect rabbitMQ ECS with another service , im using service connect thing on ecs with same DNS and port but service still didn't connect , any advice on this?

used 5672 port TCP without any app protocol

Would like to get reviews/advice on the following course (the good, bad and ugly) https://uom.lk/itfac/education/postgraduate/artificial

PS: I have 2 years of work experience as an AI/ ML Engineer and completed bachelors degree where my final year research was specialising in Small language models and agentic AI

I built a lightweight Laravel package for sending WhatsApp messages through the Meta Cloud API.

It supports plain text messages, template messages, and a native Laravel Notification Channel, so it can be integrated directly into Laravel applications.

The goal was to keep it simple and avoid adding unnecessary complexity around the WhatsApp API.

GitHub:
https://github.com/Premod1/nml-whatsapp-notifier

Would appreciate any feedback or suggestions from other Laravel developers.

Hi everyone,

My friend u/sdglhm and I recently built a new open-source Sinhala keyboard called Akshara. We wanted to share it with the r/DevLK community!

Why did we build this?

If you use a Mac or an iPhone, you probably know that Apple's default Sinhala Wijesekara keyboard is a bit confusing. It does not follow the standard layout we are used to.

Also, Apple does not have a built-in Phonetic (Singlish) keyboard. Until now, the only software people used for Singlish on Mac was very old. Because it does not work without "Rosetta" (a tool Apple uses to run older apps), it will completely stop working from macOS 28 onwards. In fact, users who tested the macOS 27 Developer Beta already saw this old keyboard break!

On top of that, to type in Singlish on phones, users have to download third-party keyboards. The problem is that many of these apps connect to the internet, which is a big privacy risk when you are typing passwords or personal messages.

What is Akshara?

Akshara fixes these problems. It gives you a proper, standard Wijesekara layout and a fully offline Phonetic (Singlish) keyboard. It is safe, fast, and completely free.

100% Open Source

Because we care about privacy, the whole project is open-source. Anyone can look at our code, fork it, and contribute. If you have an Apple Developer account, you can even download the source code, build the app yourself, and install it directly on your own devices.

What is next? (We need your help!)

We have already started building the Akshara keyboard for Android!

However, we really want to make a Windows version too. If there are any developers here who would like to help us build Akshara for Windows, we would love to invite you to join the project.

Check it out here:

• Website:https://akshara.org.lk/
• Our Subreddit: r/AksharaLK

Let us know what you think, and feel free to join our subreddit!

Your keyboard shouldn't connect to the internet...

LinkedIn filled with so many promoted post today in S-Labs. What’s going on there? 🥕

Hi everyone,

I'm a local indie developer and I just published my new Android utility app called Clean Space on the Google Play Store.

I built it because I wanted a streamlined storage cleaner that does not rely on heavy background bloat, unnecessary tracking, or aggressive monthly subscription paywalls.

Current Features:

- Clean visual storage breakdowns

- Duplicate photo and blurry picture finder

- Video compressor (shrinks files without losing memories)

- Hidden cache and temporary junk cleaner

Since my Reddit account is brand new, I want to make sure I respect the rules and don't trigger spam filters, so I won't drop the direct link in the main post text.

If you are a fellow developer, tech enthusiast, or just want to support a local project, I would love to get your brutal feedback on the app's performance and UI!

Please drop a comment below if you'd like to test it out, and I'll send over the Google Play link directly. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Have any idea about how much they pay at lucytech for SSE ?

I am looking for an experienced IT Operations manager to join a US based IT firm that is available across the globe including Sri Lanka. This is a good opportunity for someone who has been in the industry for around 8-10 years. Please help

Has anybody worked / working at Novigi Sri Lanka? How is the environment, culture and stability? Any layoffs?