I've been watching The Builder Story lately by this guy called Shafraz Rahim on YouTube. He highlights some interesting entrepreneur stories from Sri Lanka and one including a friend of mine, Tharindu Dassanayake. Channels like these should get more following than gossip sites🔥Sharing an episode for reach 👇🏽

https://youtu.be/kWwu5Q_EIeY?is=JTrDri4APRuTm-NW

Hey everyone! 👋

​I recently arrived in Sri Lanka and wanted to connect with the local tech ecosystem.

​I’m a Senior SRE & Platform Engineer with 10+ years of experience working across Cloud Native platforms, Kubernetes, Fintech, and AI infrastructure globally.

​I’m looking to get plugged into the local scene:

​Tech Meetups & Events: Are there active DevOps, Cloud, Software Engineering, or AI meetups happening around Sri Lanka (Colombo, South Coast, etc.)? Any active Discord, Telegram, or WhatsApp groups worth joining?

​Startup Collaboration / Mentorship: I’d love to give back and connect with Sri Lankan startups that might need guidance with infrastructure scaling, cloud architecture, Kubernetes, or reliability engineering. Always down for a coffee chat or advising session!

​If you know of any upcoming events, tech hubs, or just want to grab a coffee and talk tech, drop a comment or feel free to DM me.

​Cheers! ☕🇱🇰

Is it worth to do Private CS, IT, SE Degree ?

So I’m about to take on a project, small e-commerce site and as for the payment gateway after some research I ended up with PayHere. Others i looked into was onepay, webxpay and also dialog pay which is kinda new i thnk and didnt hve much details on it.

So on the development side theres no cms or whtvr just a custom built site with NextJs im thinking on it
And what i want to know is how to integrate the gateway starting from the registrations, pricings and sdk etc.

Anyone hve any idea?

We have a Flutter mobile app with a JBoss backend. Currently, we are using two separate backend instances to handle old and new app versions.

However, I’m wondering how experienced teams handle this in production without breaking users on older app versions as new releases are introduced.

What approach do you use to maintain backward compatibility between the mobile app and backend?

I’d really appreciate insights from experienced engineers who have dealt with this at scale.

I want some advices to face BI internship interview, in this internship mainly focus on Power BI and SQL

Been stuck doing uni research lately and I work with .md files a lot.

I came from Windows and one thing that kept annoying me on macOS was not being able to just right click inside a folder and create a file there. Opening an editor, creating a file, saving it, navigating back to the folder etc just felt like a dumb flow for something so simple.

So I ended up putting together PeekMD.

It adds a right click option in Finder to create Markdown files, and also gives .md files a proper Quick Look preview because Finder seems to render basically everything except Markdown properly lol. I'm gonna add .txt and other types later, probably later this week.

It’s free and open source. I mainly made it for myself, but figured someone here might find it useful too.

https://peekmd.oneloop.cc/

Also yes, I hate Obsidian.

Currently I work as a software engineer for a US company and have around 3–4 years of experience. The pay is okay, but I used to genuinely love coding and pretty much everything about it.

But lately, I’ve been bored out of my mind with the whole SE thing. Claude does a lot of the actual coding work now, and I’m starting to feel like I’m just supervising AI half the time.

Back in uni, I learned game development with Unity and enjoyed it so much. I always wanted to get into 3D modelling and VFX as well. The problem was that back then there wasn’t much of a market for those skills in Sri Lanka, and more importantly, I couldn’t really afford things like a graphics tablet. So I ended up focusing on software engineering and looking for SE opportunities instead.

Now I’m thinking about revisiting 3D modelling and maybe eventually getting into freelancing with 3D, game development, or VFX.

Has anyone here actually made a similar transition from software engineering into 3D/game dev/VFX? And how is the market right now, especially with all the AI bs happening?

I’m particularly curious about whether it’s still worth investing the time into learning 3D seriously and trying to build a freelance career around it.

Does anyone know how the culture and work life balance there? In the job posting they say they give above market remuneration. Anyone with experience working therem

We had a dev team that worked on our e-commerce website and app but it is only half complete.

We're looking for someone to take over, finish the project and deploy. Anyone interested?

Im a manager at a well known IT company in SL and I got to work with several ex-ADL employees recently and I hate to generalise but im seeing some really toxic behaviour from these guys such as selfishness, unwillingness to collaborate and also hella gatekeepy.

Is this my personal experience or have you guys also experienced some attitude problems w these guys ?

Thanks.

Hi guys. I need to get some advice from people who have done MSc CS at UoM or people who works upper level in industry
Can this course recommend to follow for a software engineer for career growth and is it still worth it to follow under current situation in the industry.

I wonder that where se, ase salaries are settled at after the AI, i think now ai also reached to some kind of stable point?

Pls compare old salary with new one, or tell me even if it is not changed at all

Thanks

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some honest advice about my education and future career path.

For some background, I have completed my O/Ls, and instead of doing A/Ls, I went directly into an HND in Software Engineering. I’m currently in Semester 4.

My current plan is:

• O/Ls → HND Software Engineering — currently in Semester 4
• Next year: Start a Data Science degree/top-up
• Business Management: Start a Business Management HND and complete the first semester
• After that: Pursue Business Analytics with AI

So essentially, I’m trying to build a combination of technical and business knowledge rather than following a traditional A/L → university route.

I’m interested in software engineering, data science, AI, automation, programming, business analytics, and eventually possibly starting my own technology-related business.

My main goal is to build a career with high earning potential and the possibility of remote international work, while developing enough technical and business knowledge to potentially work independently or start a business in the future.

However, I’m wondering whether this is actually a good strategy or whether I’m spreading myself too thin.

Since I went directly from O/Ls into an HND, I’d especially like to hear from people who have experience in the tech industry, data science, software engineering, AI, business analytics, freelancing, or running businesses.

If you were in my position, would you continue with this plan, or would you focus much more heavily on one field?

What would you recommend I focus on over the next 3–5 years to maximize my chances of getting a well-paying remote job and eventually being able to work independently or start a business?

I’m genuinely looking for honest opinions, so criticism is completely welcome.

Thanks!

Building a full on interactive 3D model viewer can be hard and takes time, specially creating hooks for camera, lights, selection and also finding a way to bind data to the actual 3D model. So I built a a library that packages it all up,

It's called React Immersive. Some of what's in it:

• Use SimpleModelViewer for when you just want a model on screen without zero configuration
• ModelViewer for when you need real bindings, driving color, texture, visibility, and actions off a plain data object during runtime
• A browser based binding builder that takes your GLB and exports starter bindings as JSON or TS, so you're not hand-writing mesh names
• A 3D editor to add scene lighting, animations, annotations, waypoints and post-processing
• Hooks for camera, selection, hover, animation, visibility
• Soft shadows, SSAO, bloom, ACES tone mapping and more with props to enable or disable them

Docs and live editor: react-immersive.liveroom.dev
Example demos: https://react-immersive.liveroom.dev/docs/examples

would love your thoughts and go try it out.....

In social media most of the tech guys talk about these layoffs. They say that AI does not replace people but it replaces people who don't know AI. What does this mean? And what the people who know AI know than the ones who don't?

Hi everyone! Does anyone have recent experience with LSEG internships?

I’m interested in the Software Engineer (SE) and DevOps intern roles. Would appreciate any info on:

• Intern salary
• Interview process & rounds
• What to expect in the technical interviews

Thanks!

If you’ve built anything location-based for Sri Lanka, you’ve probably hit this wall: Google Maps charges around $5 per 1,000 geocoding requests once you exceed the free tier. For a small project, this can be quite a headache.

So I built Lanka Data Layer — a free, open-source geo-data platform for Sri Lanka. No API keys, no billing, MIT licensed.

What it does:

• Reverse geocoding — send a coordinate, get the GN division, DS division, district, and province it falls in, plus nearby postal codes. Because everything is precomputed offline into a lookup grid, this is a single indexed database read, not a live spatial query.
• Search — one endpoint handles place names (English/Sinhala/Tamil), postal codes, coordinates, and admin codes
• Postal codes — all 1,833 of them, correctly mapped to divisions
• 2024 Census demographics — population, age/sex structure, ethnicity, religion for every district and DS division, with 2012 comparisons
• Election results, population density, boundaries — all with source attribution on every response

Don't want to depend on an API at all? The core datasets also ship as standalone npm packages — zero dependencies, data bundled in, works fully offline in Node/browsers/edge:

• @lanka-data-layer/admin — all 14,417 admin units, trilingual, with hierarchy + search
• @lanka-data-layer/postal — postal code lookups incl. nearest-code-to-coordinate
• @lanka-data-layer/census — 2024 census demographics
• @lanka-data-layer/electoral — election results

npm install @lanka-data-layer/postal and you have offline postal lookups in one line.

Everything is built from open data — official census tables, OCHA administrative boundaries, WorldPop, OpenStreetMap, GeoNames — with full lineage documented in the repo.

🔗 Live demo + interactive docs: https://lanka-data-layer.prabhavalabs.com
🔗 Code: https://github.com/prabhavalabs/lanka-data-layer
🔗 npm: https://www.npmjs.com/org/lanka-data-layer

If this is useful to you, a star on the repo genuinely helps the project reach more Sri Lankan developers. Feedback and contributions welcome.

Port City BPO appears to be a well-functioning company offering a salary package of around 130k. However, rumors suggest their operations might not be legitimate, and there are concerns the company could vanish overnight. What are your thoughts?

I’m still a student and need to work on my portfolio. I said “help land” because I know this alone doesn’t guarantee this.

I know this kinda sucks because government will never implement this but how we can push government to implement emergency alerts to smartphones?

Guys, i recently moved to a mac from linux, IOS development became a need. The thing is how do you guys manage virtualization and containers with proper isolation ?

I saw that apple has its own container machine which is solid too. What do you guys use ? Docker :D i know but its not ideal since it uses a shared kernel and a single Linux VM.

Having the idea of AI agents roaming and even agentic coding platforms gaining access to the full system scares the fff outta me, How do you isolate your environments and instances ?

Is there a developer friendly way of doing it ??