Chronicles of a builder

Humble beginnings

First and foremost, I consider myself a builder who is fascinated by how things work. When I was a child, I used to dismantle my toys to understand the internal workings, much to the dismay of my parents. From a young age, I knew that I wanted to be an engineer, even though my mother wanted me to become a medical doctor! That would have been a disaster given my trypanophobia & hemophobia! (Yes, I googled those terms too). Problem solving has also been one of my pet peeves. I enjoyed solving math problems, which always gave me joy and adrenaline rush (I think), which led me to choose pure & applied mathematics as the field of study during my advanced levels. I am blessed that I have been able to select a field of work which is in line with my passion. To be frank, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about computer science & programming as much as I was about mechanics & electronics. Perhaps this is because I came from a lower middle class family somewhat struggling to make ends meet, and a computer was a luxury those days. I only got myself a computer when I was 21 years old and I was an engineering student at the University of Moratuwa at that time. The way out of poverty towards financial stability for people like me was through education — in Sri Lanka, education up to the bachelor’s degree is free & funded by the people, however, you need to get through some of the most competitive exams because of the limited slots available in government universities.

Life as a young university student

Getting into the University of Moratuwa opened up the horizons for me. At the end of the first year of study, we had to sit for a competitive exam that allowed us to choose a specialization. The top choices used to be electronics & telecommunications, and computer science & engineering (CSE). The choices were dependent on the marks you got at the end of the first year exam. Once again I was blessed to be placed 2nd in that batch of around 350 students and now I was in a dilemma because I could choose any field. The heart said choose electronics or mechanical engineering, but the brain said choose CSE; The entry level salary for CSE was way above the other fields & in general, a career in IT pays more even in the long term. As a person who loves everything to do with vehicles, I wanted to buy my first car as soon as possible, and where I live, vehicles are a luxury due to extremely high taxes. In the battle between hearth & brain, the brain won! By this time, I had my first computer & taught myself several programming languages & started building interesting stuff using code. Once I coded a personal project for 3 days at a stretch with little rest! Now the heart was also starting to like my career choice because I figured I could build interesting things using computers. To this day, I build stuff in the physical & cyber worlds whenever I find the time. You can find some of my projects at https://github.com/afkham. At a time where virtual machines & containers were unheard of, my final year project, a gossip protocol, involved a cluster of more than 30 physical machines!

After graduating from the University of Moratuwa, I launched my career as an associate software engineer at Virtusa, Sri Lanka. On my very first project, which was a shipping ports management system, even though I was one of the juniors on the team consisting of more than 100, I was given the responsibility of building a hardware integration module. I first wrote simulators for the hardware because the hardware was in the US. After a month on the job, I got the privilege of traveling to the US to work with the real hardware and complete the module. Even though I achieved & learned a lot during that period, my stay at Virtusa was brief. During the first two years of my career, I worked in 3 different companies and the main reason for parting ways was boredom — remember, I’m a builder, my heart is not at ease when I’m not building or learning things that will help me build things.

Life at WSO2

For the past 15+ years, I’ve been working at WSO2. I’m employee #20. When the company launched in 2005, I remember seeing an advertisement in the papers. The highlight for me was this line, which I would consider the motto of the company — “our architects are our best programmers’’. All the architects I had seen in other IT companies in Sri Lanka didn’t code so this caught my attention. I knew that this company was going to be different & only the best of the best got into it at that time so I was secretly hoping I could be part of that great company. I had joined another company just two months prior, and was regretting that decision because they made me sit at my desk from 9 to 5 and write unit tests for someone else’s code I didn’t really understand, and they weren’t making use of my skills. Moreover, I wasn’t learning anything new or building anything. I also had a couple of batchmates working at WSO2 & one of them asked whether I’d consider joining WSO2. Needless to say, I was thrilled! My batchmate Eran Chinthaka (now Dr. Eran Withana) had put in a good word & the interview went smoothly. It was more of a casual chat than an interview & at the end of it, my interviewer Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana asked me when I could join! I couldn’t believe it. This seemed like the dream job I was looking for.

A month after the interview, on the 1st of December 2005, I joined WSO2 as a senior software engineer. I got to contribute to very interesting & challenging projects in the Apache Software Foundation, eventually which earned me membership in the Foundation. The stuff I was building was being used by thousands of others users & hundreds of companies. This gave me a real sense of fulfillment. My Master’s degree from the University of Moratuwa was fully funded by WSO2 & I was the first recipient of the program which came to be known as the graduate study program. My research related to autoscaling Axis2 web services played a leading role in the WSO2 StratosLive cloud. Components that I built as part of that research, which included Axis2 clustering & elastic load balancer were core components in StratosLive. I did justice to the funding I received by obtaining the highest GPA in my MSc batch. I went on to lead or play a leading role in a number of projects at WSO2 including WSO2 Application Server, Stratos, StratosLive, Carbon, MSF4J, IoT Server & Cellery. I also got the opportunity to speak & participate in many conferences including ApacheCon, OSCon, WSO2Con & KubeCon.

Leading from the front

Continuous learning & application of what you learn to solve real world problems is something I deeply believe in. I also encourage others to do the same. While I set up a study group for WSO2 team members to share knowledge related to Kubernetes certifications, organized Kubernetes & cloud-native awareness sessions, I myself took the CKA & CKAD Kubernetes (again, generously funded by WSO2) exams last year. Recall the WSO2 advertisement from 2005 - the architects at WSO2 are the best programmers — it is still the case & I am still able to roll my sleeves up & write code when the need arises. It gives me a great sense of achievement to sit back and look at code I wrote & technologies I helped build over the course of the past 15+ years being used by our users & organizations to solve their problems.

I have seen WSO2 transition through many stages, I’ve seen all the ups & downs, I’ve seen the company survive through covid-19, and now I have been given the opportunity to play a leading role in the next major transition, that is becoming a cloud-native software engineering company. The announcement of the public beta launch of Choreo & the acquisition of Platformer are just the beginning. It makes me happy that Choreo contains some Ballerina code that I wrote and that I was also the one who wrote the first Kubernetes & Kustomize manifests, cluster setup scripts & defined the gitops processes. My team of course followed my lead & have made leaps & bounds in terms of iterative improvements. As a leader that gives me a great sense of accomplishment to have shown the way through example & not just ordering them around or talking in terms of abstract concepts only.

Keep learning & experimenting

I recently got my amateur radio license, which requires passing a written exam & practical morse code test. This allows me to conduct on-air experiments related to communications technology & radio signal propagation, in addition to learning a new area. I’m 42 now even though many think I’m 27 :P , and scientific studies have shown that as you grow older, you need to keep exercising your brain to avoid loss of brain cells. It saddens me that many of my friends in non-tech fields think they are too old to learn anything new. Recently I was able to build a morse code transceiver and propagate my signal from my home in Bellanvila on the west coast to my amateur radio friend, Prabath 4S6RSP in Kilinocchi on the north eastern coast of Sri Lanka using a mere 200 mW of power! This gave my childlike joy! These are the moments I live for.

Here is a pic from a Raspberry Pi cluster we built for WSO2Con many years ago. We ran a 24 node WSO2 Application Server cluster on this setup!

There was this other time where I completely stripped down a motorcycle and did restoration work on it. I learnt the art of spray painting by trial and error during the course of this project.

During my free time, I enjoy doing repairs & maintenance work on my vehicles in my home garage myself. I find it therapeutic. Moreover, I have many tools that are not found in the average garage in Sri Lanka, and by referring to online resources, I’m sometimes able to do a better job than those garages.

The journey continues…

So what made me stay at WSO2 for so long even though I changed jobs thrice in two years during the early part of my career? Remember in the beginning I said that I’m a builder, the moment I’m not building, thinking about building, or learning about building, I lose motivation. I also said that throughout the years, WSO2 has also gone through many stages, which allowed the company to keep innovating. It is as if I have worked at five different companies in the past 15 years. Web services, OSGi, clustering, microservices architecture, cloud computing, cloud-native technologies are just a few of the things in the list, and it looks like the next stage of the party is just starting, and I’m excited to be part of it. During the long covid-19 lockdown periods, I have been able to maintain my sanity through creative work & DIY projects.

Hope you enjoyed reading this & have a great day!