LakTEK A Sri Lankan, A Rubyist and A Web Dude

First Meetup of LK Ruby User Group

Last Wednesday (30th September 2009), the first-ever meatspace gathering of Sri Lankan Ruby Users was held at Ridgecrest Asia (Pvt) Ltd. There were more than 20 passionate, enthusiastic Rubyists filling the room and I would call it a promising start.

For several years, myself personally knew only handful of Rubyists in the country. Though, we had shared the love for the language, we doubted whether we could anticipate large adoption of Ruby culture in Sri Lanka and ever have a active community going here. One of the main reasons for that was at that time there were no mainstream industry demand for Ruby. There were only couple of startups doing Ruby (Rails) based development and very few of developers had the freedom to choose their development toolbox by themselves. So someone choosing Ruby as their main language of choice was a rarity.

However, in the last couple of years things have started to change. Globally, Ruby has received a mainstream adoption and success of Rails made it a de-facto consideration when it comes to web apps. This has made Sri Lankan developers and firms to think about Ruby more seriously. We’ve seen several new interesting Ruby based projects coming up, also, heard several firms considering to migrate their legacy code to Ruby. Overall, these are great signs promising some exciting times ahead to aspiring Ruby developers in the country.

Unlike Java, .NET or other commercial mainstream platforms Ruby developers are not gauged through professional certifications or training programs. As Matz believed, people should be able to express themselves freely when programming. This is something that cannot be trained or teached, only way one could absorb these Rubyisms is through passion and practice. That’s the key difference between a Rubyist and other commercial developers. But Ruby community believes in collective efforts and in helping each other to groom themselves.

The main idea of forming a Sri Lankan Ruby User Group (LK-RUG), was to help the developers to be inspired. It is harder to be inspired while working in isolation, especially when you are starting to grasp things. A gathering like this could help the people to share what they learnt from their experiences, while learning few tips and tricks from others. Behind many great rubyists there is a community which helped them groom. I believe same could happen in this country too. And the very first meeting gave positive signs for that. It was informal, friendly and very enthusiastic gathering. Let’s hope we could maintain the same spirit in the future meetings too.

So, if you already hacks with Ruby or eager to learn about Ruby culture, join with the Sri Lankan Ruby User Group and participate in the future meetings.

BTW, Here are the slides from my presentation on “Evolution of Rails”, which was done in the first meeting.

P.S. Special Thanks to Sameera Gayan, for coordinating the event and Ridgecrest Asia (Pvt) Ltd. for offering the the location for the meeting.

Update (05/10/2009):

Gaveen’s thoughts on the meetup

Flickr Photoset of the meetup (uploaded by Gaveen)

Independent Thinking

Independent thinking and self-concious decision making is what builds a person and the society. Yet, it’s the most discouraged, criticised and often punishable act that a person can do. Our culture has done a nice job by misinterpreting and abusing values - such as obedience, loyalty and teamwork to suppress the importance of independent thinking.

This starts to happen from our birth, where parents tries to give extra protection and care all the time. They will not let their eyes off the child, would not allow the child to touch anything or to play at his desire. This may be purely unintentional and due to their excess love for their child. However, unconsciously when they continue this beyond the limits, they do actually harm their child by blocking the creative sense and opportunities for self-realization. Afterall, humans are not weak as we seem.

As I discussed in the previous post, schools to exert enough pressure to kill off the rest of the independent thinking capabilities within a person. This will continue to happen until the exam oriented education structure vanishes and people realises the value of each other irrespective of the educational or social background he comes from. Sir.Ken Robinson nicely presents this point in this TEDTalk. Take some time to watch it, if you haven’t seen it before.

Things get worse, when you enter into higher education, where you expect the independent and critical thinking is to be fostered. You are guaranteed to have poor grades if you are to challenge or tries to explore beyond what is taught. Parrotised lecture notes should be vomited on the paper if you want higher grades (is it the lack of knowledge or envy is still a puzzle). With the beliefs of higher the GPA, higher is your salary, nobody doesn’t seem to be bothered to diss the current knowledge system. These professionals are so vulnerable to change and would never encourage their sub-ordinates to change. This results with a legacy knowledge system that is incapable of solving today’s problems.

When it comes to politics, corporate business or any other form of community activities you see the obvious. There is very little room (or actually no room) for independent thinkers. You’re assured to be sidelined, mocked, harassed and in worst case even to pay the penalty with your life, if you are to hold a different point of view from the so called majority (which is actually a minority, which has exploited the power and force to grab the blind following of the rest, who have been trained not to use their wit by the earlier systems).

Just think about it independently ;)

Ban Schools & Education!

It’s very sad and alarming to hear the recent incidents taking place at Sri Lankan schools. Government shows they are so concerned about these issues by banning everything they believe that can harm our next generation :) Mobile phones at all schools are banned, Web Sites with explicit content are banned, screening of “Adults only” movies are banned. Ok, now government could say they have taken all necessary steps to groom our next generation to be well disciplined citizens, and future our country is guaranteed to be prosperous.

However, governments and its so-called advisers will never realize the root causes of all these problems. Their short sighted decisions and floating policies from the past, have aggravated these problems to this level and none of their decisions would help to change the situation in the long run.

I believe Sri Lankan education system is screwed in big time! Kids are thrown in to a rat race from the kingdergarden, when they don’t even have a slight clue on where they are heading. Not to mention, even after going through all the steps of primary, secondary and tertiary education, more than 80% of them still don’t have an idea why they ran all these years. It leaves a big question whether do we have to run at all?

Aside from the spoon-fed knowledge only selfishness, insensitivity, jealousy and hunchback (after carrying a school bag of 4KGs) are the only gains of this current education system. Why Sri Lankan education system failed so miserably in building citizens with self-confidence that they are someone who is adding value to the society? Why can’t someone be a janitor, carpenter, factory worker, farmer, dancer, sportsman or a doctor and still feel they are all equal in the society?

This false social grading starts from the primary school admissions. It’s only the kids of the rich and so called elites will be admitted to the popular schools. No matter how closer you live to the school, your child would not be admitted if you cannot afford to give a hefty donations to school’s development fund or if you don’t have enough civil power and political influence. From year 1 these kids starts associating only with a certain social layer and will never understand their is another way of life lower or higher than them. They will measure the quality of their lives relative to these layers. Basically, layer above them are the most superior, powerful and layer below them are the inferior, wretched. They will never understand all these social layers has their own mix of good and bad.

Next biggest mistake is the mis-interpretation of aesthetics and extra-curricular activities in schools. You are not allowed to sing or a dance, if you are cannot select for Derana Little Star. If you are not a play cricket, if you cannot select for college XI. Talking about myself, I had no skill on any sport or aesthetics. Still, I went to football practices, bloody well knowing that I will never be selected for the college team. I participated in drama, dancing and singing practices for cultural day in every year, though I only got the chance to be on stage handful of times. Later I learnt it wasn’t my talent. But looking back today, the experience and lessons learnt through those activities is impossible to gain from sitting in a classroom. The negligence of extra curricular activities in schools is also a main cause of the unfortunate incidents we hear today. I know some schools cancelling Sports Meets, Cultural Days to finish the syllabuses on time. Can we call such places as schools?

There are more stuff running through my mind, but I will stop this rant at here. What I want to stress is whether you are a govt. official, principal, teacher, parent, got a sibling or even a total outsider - please pay your attention to the root causes and be aware of what’s really happening at schools. I’m sure none of you would want to hear more unfortunate incidents.

Six virtues of being an IT undergrad…

If you were one of the early readers of my blog, you would know that I was selected to do my Bachelors in IT at Faculty of Information Technology in University of Moratuwa. It’s hard to believe 3 years have gone pass in a flash, but reminiscing what I gathered during this period it feels really awesome.

From my young age, I had the passion to play computers and internet. Those days I used to day-dream of building all sorts of awesome products and believe me I still have some of the pen-sketches of those ideas. When it came to Ordinary Levels I had already got the opportunity to do some work with local web development companies (especially with awesome folks at E-Fusion, the people who did kaputa.com - which became the trend setter of Sri Lankan portals). So my initial idea was to say good bye to formal education from O/Ls and get into work in IT for full time. I even had some friends at school, who were ready to work with me on a startup. However, my mentor at that time Mr.Niranjan Meegamana of E-Fusion, influenced me that I should continue with my secondary education and should pursue a degree in IT, if I really want to have a long journey in the industry. That motivation directed me to end up in selecting to Sri Lanka’s only national degree course for IT.

Initially I had few doubts how the things would turn up, mainly due to all the crappy stuff I had heard and seen about local universities. However, things turned out to be really peaceful within IT faculty and University of Moratuwa. There were zero-interruptions for the course and third-party influences were very much less. Honestly, I believe getting in to the IT faculty was one of the best things happened in my life and it opened me lot of opportunities to reach my ultimate goal.

I thought of sharing some of those experiences and highlights hoping it would help to inspire someone else.

1. It’s Free

Thanks to free education structure in Sri Lanka - I’m privileged to do my degree course for free, which would have cost more that USD$ 10-15K if I did it from a university in other country or in a private institute. Coming from a average middle-class family, I’m really happy that I could continue my higher education without being a burden for my parents.

2. Converted to FOSS

When I stepped into IT faculty, I was not a hardcore advocate for FOSS. But within few weeks due to the influences of FOSS advocates at the faculty - like Prabhath, Mifan, Anushke and Amila, I too converted to be a FOSS purist. Since then I haven’t looked back and today free software culture has become an integral part of my life. Joys and benefits reaped of free software culture, fits into separate post. So will share more on that in future.

3. Internship at a startup as a freshman

As Paul Graham says “The way to learn about startups is by watching them in action, preferably by working at one”. I got this opportunity from my freshman year. Prabhath, who happened to be my mentor and role-model at the university, invited me to join with them at Vesess. The inspiration, motivation I gathered just by watching how they work was immense. The experience you gain from the challenges at a startup cannot be matched by any other learning experience. Not only you get to solve problems that will matter in real life, you will see how people use what you build. Our product for online billing - CurdBee today has become one of the most essential apps for freelancers.

4. Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code program is a program hosted by Google to encourage university students around the globe to contribute to Open Source software. There is a strong interest for this program in the University of Moratuwa (In 2008, it happened to be the top university in the world, with most accepted students for GSOC). I also had the opportunity take part in GSOC in 2007, where I worked on Silverstripe CMS Framework. I successfully completed building a Mashups module for Silverstripe and released my work for public use.

5. Opportunities to network

As I believe most important stuff you learn at university is learnt out of the lecture room. I had the chance to listen and talk with lot of amazing people, who were from different walks of the life. Some of them were the visiting lecturers, seniors, own batchmates and some were just random dudes who accidentaly caught up to a little chat at the canteen while having a tea. No matter who are they, listening and sharing thoughts with them helped me to expanded my perspectives and change my attitudes towards life. During our usual after lunch banters - we go through unimaginable number of topics like music, cricket, geekery, hacking, farming, environment, oil crisis to politics to women, sex to religious philosophies and etc. It’s truly amazing what a lot of knowledge and experiences can be shared when such highly diversified group of people get together.

6. Lurking on the internet gives you the fringe

In IT you rarely get to parrotize long formulas or boring theories. You need not to burn yourself doing field researches, no need to waste your time with boring practicals. No need to run after seniors for ‘kuppis’ during the exam time. All you have to know is how to use Google and Wikipedia to get through all the academic stuff. I have sat for exams without having a single note and only reading Wikipedia. If you have a little itch to read more on a subject and keep yourself with the latest trends, you will have a fringe benefit over others. I don’t think there could be any better academic course than IT, for a internet addict like me.

It’s not the qualification you gain from an academic degree course that matters, but the exposure, opportunities and experience you gain during the journey, will shape your future.

Sticking to Basics

I love Test Cricket. I believe it has very close resemblance to our real lives, and it gives so much of inspiration. Sri Lanka’s remarkable victory today against Pakistan after being at the jaws of defeat, yet another classic example for that. Pakistan were dominating in first 3 days of the game and it was almost certain they have sealed the victory by end of yesterday. Yet, within just one unfocused, carefree session of play they did let go all the good they did in past 3 days.

On the other hand Sri Lankans, went to field today with a glimpse of hope of a victory. They needed to bowl out Pakistanis before within a mere target of 97 runs. Given the strong batting line up of Pakistan, it seemed daunting task and seemed only a miracle could reverse the result. But Sri Lankans did win comfortably at the end! without any miracles or magic. Sri Lanka’s match winning bowlers - Murali, Vaas or Malinga was not even in the playing XI. Ajantha Mendis, the only trump card for Sri Lanka, did only had an ordinary game. So what changed the game? It was the hardwork of 3 average bowlers - namely Herath, Thushara and Kulasekara. They bowled with discipline and skipper Sangakkara kept the trust in them and rightfully exploited the opportunities.

Pakistan skipper Younis Khan, very correctly explained what cost them the game - “When I am under pressure, I go back to my basics. They need to go back to basics too. Break it down into small-small sessions, be it batting, be it bowling, be it fielding. It’s only a six-hour day, it shouldn’t be that difficult.”

Isn’t this what happens in our lives too? When things are going fine for us we tend to neglect our basics. Also, when things go wrong we do experiment and seek all sorts of other fixes - but forgetting to return to our basics. Today’s game teached us the value of sticking to our basics. That’s the secret mantra for success!