Life at WSO2

On this last day of year 2008, I got up in the morning thinking about the year which is going to be over in few hours. It has been a milestone in my life in many ways. After completing my Computer Science and Engineering degree at the CSE department of University of Moratuwa, I joined WSO2 as a Software Engineer in May 2008. Since then it has been a wonderful experience for me to work in an extremely friendly environment with huge amount of freedom.

Technically I think WSO2 is the best place in Sri Lanka for a fresh graduate. I’ve been very lucky to work with some giants in web services like Dr. Sanjiva, Paul Fremantle and my project manager Afkham Azeez. I feel like I’ve improved a lot in many ways within this period of 8 months with the challenges assigned to me at WSO2. I can remember that my first task was to develop a Carbon component to implement throttling in which I was successful. Since then I’m extremely happy to tell that I’ve made some valuable contributions in 2 major product releases at WSO2. First one was WSO2 Data Services 1.0.1. After that on December 24th we made a major release of WSO2 WSAS. This is the first release of WSAS on top of our new Carbon platform which is highly dynamic and developed using OSGi technology.

On the other hand, life at WSO2 is simply amazing and full of fun. I think it is due to flat hierarchy and less formality. There are no hard rules, no strict times to attend at work, can work from home if feel like and almost everything is as at home. We play Carom, Basket Ball, Fooseball and Table Tennis almost everyday. I’ve heard some outside people say “WSO2 guys work from home and come to office to have some fun” which is very true in some days. From the beginning of my university life I didn’t like to stay at Colombo even for 10, 12 consecutive days as I didn’t like the environment and food I got there. I used to go home (which is at Galle, 120km from Colombo) every possible day when I was at university. But after joining WSO2, I think things have changed a lot. Still I like to go home, but now I don’t feel much difference between my home and office. That’s because of the fun I’m having at office.

This doesn’t mean that we have less work at WSO2. When looking back, we’ve worked so hard during last 6 months. But still I’ve never felt boring or tired. I think its because of the amount of fun we are having. At the end of the day, I can say that this is a wonderful start to my career in many ways. I’m extremely happy with my technical improvement and my contributions to our products. And also I feel like life is so smooth and full of fun than ever before. Now I’m looking forward to year 2009 and hope it will also be full of fun and technical challenges which i enjoy very much.