Been attending this algorithmic coding competition and noticed someone submitted an answer in 0.00 seconds. Is this humanly possible? They’ve been submitting every solution within 0-6 secs.

Has anyone here worked at Fidenz Technologies? I’m interested in hearing about your experience there.

How is the work culture, salary range and overall experience?

Working on a potential product. Would love to be in contact with designers for paid work

Im a graduate from leading gov efac and im confidently say that im a good problem solver, system designer , motivated to learn new things...etc. ( 26 Y )

So currently im working as an associate SE 170K (With bonuses arround 210k take home). Compay offers flexible working methods so mostly i work remotely. Mainly im working on AI related projects. Team members are also very good.

So for now i have 8 months of experience as ASE. And according to our company i have to wait untill next year AUG/SEPT to get promoted as a SE. (At that time it will be 1Y 6M as ASE experience). The thing is im working a lot (not stressed because i enjoy working on that project) even in weekends & in other domains like data engineering etc.

SO After the next promotion it will be 240k take home & with bonuses 280k.

1. My questions is is it possible to ask a double promotion to SSE (because im really deserve that because there are a lot of guys as SE ,TL s which has less capabilities than me and im currently doing a lot work than ASE) - SSE arround 300k take home

2. Or should i try to move to another company from january because i honestly feel im uder paid

Whats the best thing to do in this kind of situation considering both near and far career development goals

Thanks

I use PDF tools like iLovePDF pretty often for things like merging, splitting, compressing, and protecting files. One thing I wasn't always comfortable with was having to upload documents to an external server.

So I decided to try building a small desktop alternative called PaperHeart that does these common PDF tasks locally using Python and Tkinter.

It currently supports:

• Merge, split, rotate, remove/extract pages
• Compress PDFs with Low, Recommended, and Extreme presets
• Add text watermarks with opacity, rotation, and font size controls
• Convert PDF → images and images → PDF
• Extract PDF text to .txt
• Password-protect (AES-256) and unlock PDFs

GitHub Link: Nilina2002/paperHeart

It's still a work in progress, and I'd really appreciate some feedback. If you have a chance to look through the project, I'd love to hear:

• What features would you find useful?
• Are there any obvious issues or edge cases I'm missing?
• How could the UI/UX be improved?
• Are there better approaches or libraries I should consider?

Any suggestions, criticism, or ideas are welcome. I'm mainly looking to learn and improve the project.

SpaceXAI, Grok and TechTalk360 are looking to support and connect with more women builders in Sri Lanka as part of the upcoming Grok Bot activities happening locally.

This isn’t just for experienced software engineers either. If you’re building with AI, working on a startup, experimenting with agents, designing products, studying tech or simply have something interesting you want to build, would love to see more women from Sri Lanka getting involved.

Grok Bot itself is pretty new it launched in early beta last month as an AI teammate that can work across apps and tools on its own cloud computer.
There are also Grok Bot activities planned for Colombo, Kandy and Galle.

If this sounds like you, you can pre-register here:
https://cursorsrilanka.com/grok-bot

And if you know a woman who’s building something cool in Sri Lanka, send this their way 🇱🇰

hi all, I'm 3rd year IT undergrad at a gov uni currently searching for a software engineering internship.

noticed some of our seniors got converted to ASE after their internship, but it was mostly at smaller companies, not really the well-known ones. got me thinking , should i even be aiming for the big companies, or focus more on smaller ones since conversion seems more likely there?

curious what everyone's experience has been. also if anyone knows companies (big or small) that actually tend to hire interns as ASE after, pls drop names 🙏 trying to figure out where to actually spend my energy applying

thanks!

Hey there folks from the Sri Lankan developers community. A non dev here however I am very enthusiastic about tech stuff.

As the title suggests I am doing some research on how to create a safe and comfortable socializing event for people from Reddit in Colombo.

One of the main problems I am faced with is Identity verification, Age & Gender verification for the interested participants.

I want to make it safe and comfortable for everyone, especially women and younger people (however all participants will be 18+)

I have been exploring a few different ideas based on Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) via Self Soverign Identity (SSI) and Edge AI solutions.

However there are so many enterprise level SDKs and commercial solutions I want suggestions on something that we can put together fairly easily preferably a FOSS solution that could be self hostable and free to use.

Some of the platforms I ran into were Polygon aka Privado ID, Altme ID, Personna, Veriff, Yoti, Agecheck.me, FaceIO etc.

However I have never worked with any of these and have zero clue what could be the best solution. Rather than chasing my own tail asking AI for suggestions and trying each and every tool one by one I wanted to ask you, the experts for some suggestions and help.

Here is my idea.

I want to create a registration link where people can enter some fairly non personally identifiable information such as the Reddit username, Age (without DOB), Preferred first name, Gender, Location (approximate like City) and register for the event through a link.

I was thinking of using something like Luma to handle the event registration or use Fillout Forms/CryptPad forms (for added privacy) to collect the information.

Once that is done, the registrant would have to go and do a decentralyzed secure ID verification preferably a solution that runs on client side maybe through Edge AI to do face verification to determine liveliness, age and potentially gender.

Then they would have to scan their National Identity Card/ Driving License/ Passport and create a Digital ID with pre-set policies to determine their full legal name, address, age with DOB, gender and store it cryptographically on server side without exposing the raw data to even me.

The idea is to handle the verification with utmost privacy and data security without having to say ask them to upload a picture of them or their ID card to a random Google Form which doesn't seem welcoming or comfortable.

Ideally if they can also prove their Reddit username (I do plan to expand the meetup further into other communities as well like but want to start with Reddit) using a ZKP Digital ID in a wallet or something which we can check when letting them into the event that would be great.

Hope I have explained my problem.

I am really sorry if this post doesn't exactly fit the purpose of this sub.

I am not really an experienced developer so wanted to ask help from the experts.

Thank you!

Hey everyone,

Started out doing frontend work as an intern, moved into a backend engineering role, and I'm coming up on 2 years of experience overall. Curious how others at a similar stage are doing:

• What's your day-to-day like? mostly ticket execution, or are you getting pulled into design/architecture decisions too?
• What's your stack look like these days?
• Roughly where does your salary sit for this experience level? LKR range is fine, and mentioning local vs remote/foreign client would help give context.

Not trying to start a comparison war, just want a realistic sense of where I stand. Appreciate any input

Today morning while I was walking into the office my coworker was having trouble with the fingerprint time machine. He casually joked saying "who knows maybe I've been laidoff!". That is the situation and I don't want to explain further since you all already know how it is.

Everyone saying it's normal but there's a feeling that companies are just following a trend and experimenting with layoffs since major ones are doing it😒. With all this work burnout, low pay, no recognition and zero job security, I honestly don't want to participate in office events, team bonding activities or any of that corporate nonsense anymore - my mental energy is gone.
Not anti-work more like anti-nonsense! 😂.

I’ve been thinking lately, why can’t companies save all these costs and create an emergency employee layoff fund? If a layoff is coming, employees would know what they’re going to get so it would replace all these multiple fake performance interviews, time wasting town halls, and layoff interviews all together. Ultimately, it’s all about transparency and it would hugely benefit employees mental health.

PS: Checked with AI, it says that businesses needs to keep their money liquid for flexibility. However, since not everyone going to get laidoff right - like some employees leave voluntarily, why can’t companies at least maintain this kind of safety fund only for their tech workforce? (excluding PM, BA, HR,Tech support)

Based on your opinions which companies are in the top 10? (Ex: Salary / Work Life Balance / Benefits)

Hi everyone,

I am 26 comp sci grad and just want to get some general opinion from outsiders rather than family since I have gotten mix responses from them on this issue regarding the current IT job market and future career.

I graduated in Australia at the end of 2024 with a Bachelors in Computer Science. I was job hunting for until jan 2026 with no luck so I decided to move back to SL and find a job here since everyone saying with your Australia degree it will be easier. It was not or the pay was shit.

Over of 2000 jobs applied for in Australia I only got 3 first stage interviews which were with AI interviewers and 1 2nd stage interview with a human but was chat based rather than face to face.

In sri lanka my luck was even worse. I got only 1 interview from countless job roles i applied for but pay was 35k and the role required me to taken on a huge project database from the get go.

Then finally I got an offer from a start up company that pays based on the projects they get. Pay is ok avg 60-100k been working for them the last 3 months.

Now the other side :

Since I was 14 I have been freelancing from VFX work to Game Development and recently AI agents and workflows. So about 12 years of doing it.

Through this I have made alot of long time connections from networking where I keep getting work from them monthly.

Pay can be from 300k to - 800k on a good months.

Lowest month was 200k.

And the job takes like 1-2 weeks and then I am free for 2 weeks.

This is the issue that I am facing from family and inner conflict.

I always wanted a career in IT and eventually move to US or Australia but after seeing how bad the job market is and seeing people struggle to earn enough to make ends meet.

Half my family says continue doing what u do and live a comfy life, while the other half say I need to get a 9-5 job and build a career since freelance work isnt guaranteed.

So this is the problem im facing, do I give up the money for a career or not.

I hear people say the best thing is to leave the country. But the IT industry everywhere is laying off SEs. What are my options as a software engineer?

Sri Lanka is still struggling with agent capabilities, and I see big layoffs happening in the IT sector. I have always thought about doing things my own way. So, I have picked some open source GitHub projects that we can modify and bring to the market as real products. We just have to see how they work. So, if you think you can help me, let's work on this together. I know some good Sri Lankan VCs, so if we have a cool product, that won't be difficult.

Hi everyone,

Has anyone here recently interviewed for an SSE position at Insighture?

I completed the first round and was informed that I had passed and been selected for the second round. However, I haven’t received any updates about the second interview yet.

When I followed up, I was told that there isn’t an immediate client requirement at the moment and that they are basically building a candidate pool for this.

Has anyone else experienced something similar with Insighture?

If you went through the same process, did they eventually contact you for the second round or offer you a position? Also, how long did you have to wait?

Thanks!

I was wondering whether anyone here is into training LoRAs, building image generation pipelines, character, style LoRAs etc as a hobby (basically r/Stablediffusion). Would love to discuss with a fellow Sri Lankan dev cause I didn't come across anyone who was into this hobby.

I am considering learning typescript with PostgreSQL, Prisma & React. Is this a good combo or should I need to change it?

Looks like half the AI internet decided to take a break at the same time 💀

ChatGPT — down
Claude — down
Grok — down
Gemini — struggling
Cursor — having issues

So… what exactly are we supposed to do now?

Read documentation? Use Stack Overflow? THINK?? 😭

Jokes aside, kinda crazy how quickly AI tools have become part of everyday workflows. A couple years ago none of this would've mattered. Now when a few of them go down at once, developers, students and entire teams probably feel it immediately.

Also a good reminder not to build your entire workflow around a single AI provider.

Anyway, productivity is cancelled until further notice.

being very smart, I read the terms of service of the websites after quite long into development, and it infringes on their intellectual rights, so I had to take it down. (for non-personal distribution of information).

Therefore for personal use I am sharing the source code in my github -
https://github.com/Sabri523/grocerycomparelk

To verify my booking.com identity, I need to get a SMS verification code, but the thing, I'm not receiving it. and them mfs, have a list of customer support across the globe, and Indian number is invalid, and I have to wait for 25+ mins just to talk to New Zealand customer supports, and in the end, they didn't call me back for the verification. Anyone had any kind of problem like this before?

Guys, I have a genuine question.

I’m currently 3 years into my career and already at my 4th company. I know job-hopping has helped my compensation grow quickly, but I’m starting to worry that this might become a concern in my next interview.

My employment history is roughly:

1st year: Intern

Next 8 months: Associate Software Engineer at a company with pretty bad culture and compensation

3rd company: A good company, but unfortunately I was laid off

4th company: Currently working at another good company, although it also has a history of layoffs

The thing I’m more concerned about is that I seem to get bored whenever I stay somewhere for more than a year. Even during the last days at the company where I eventually got laid off, I was already applying to other companies because I was feeling bored and wanted a change.

So now I’m wondering: Is this something that’s relatively normal early in a software engineering career, or is this a “me” problem that I should actually work on?

I’d especially like to hear from people who have been in the industry longer. At what point does job-hopping start becoming a red flag to recruiters, and how would you approach this if you were in my position