Experience and Life with WSO2

Time has gone extremely fast, and I still recall the day that I joined WSO2 as an intern. I got to know about WSO2, when Sanjaya Karunasena did the OOP lectures at 2007. He was so passionate about open source. Eventually, I ended up applying for WSO2 for my internship, excited about the open source culture, for the very same reason at that time. If I remember correctly, Deepal and Sumedha interviewed me the 2008 for my internship. Special thanks to them for selecting me as an intern. 

It was a nice experience being mentored by Srinath for the projects with Extreme! Labs. Srinath was mentoring Supun Malinga and myself remotely from the Indiana University. Srinath made sure to get us introduced to his colleagues Thilina, Eran, Chathura, and Suresh from IU. My foundation to the open source culture was strongly built with the internship at WSO2 and my first Google Summer of Code with AbiWord in 2009. With two of our friends Denis and Buddhika, Supun and I discussed our final year project with Srinath, and Dr.Srinath who returned to Sri Lanka did an outstanding job as a mentor for our final year project. My special thanks goes to Srinath for his multiple roles in Sri Lankan higher education. He surely is a gem for WSO2 and the country.

Hasmin was the first to interact with me, even before I joined WSO2 as an intern. I recall an appointment I made with her to learn about WSO2, for a Level 3 assignment. I have learned a lot on marketing strategies from her, and my initial social media engagement efforts were strongly inherited from her. I liked her initiative of "WSO2 Member of the Month", "WSO2 evangelist of the month", "WSO2 overall award for the month" (There were three monthly awards like this in 2008/2009. I am sure that I am not mentioning the exact names though.) Hasmin leads the internal and external communications of the company. I thank Hasmin for helping me realize my other strengths in Social Media Engagement, Blogging, and Technology Evangelization. 

Though we joined WSO2 as Software engineers again in September 2010, I actually was with WSO2 since the October 2008, with an extended training for 2 more months, followed by our final year project. Samisa is not just a technical leader. There is much more that we were able to learn from him, including the soft and people skills. I always have admired the way he interacts with the team. My special thanks goes to Sanjiva for selecting us as Software Engineers of WSO2. I confidently say that I have been with WSO2 since the October 2008. It was a pleasant experience, working, learning, and knowledge sharing with the engineering team.

I have worked with Charitha and the QA team, after our six months of internship, and during the releases. I have learned a lot from him in the QA aspects and release management. Prabath, with whom I unfortunately haven't got a chance to work much with personally, was surely a motivation for me. He is well-known among the young engineers for his presentation, communication, and leadership skills.

I have been working with the cloud team lead by Shankar. I got the chance to work on all the aspects from the technology, design, research and development, product releases, customer support, and user interaction. I worked with Azeez for Load Balancer (LB-1.0.0). It was a great experience shaping it as a young product. I congratulate Sanjeewa and the Load Balancer team who are currently taking the product to higher levels, as it is going to face the major release, as LB-2.0. I love the fact that I was lucky enough to work with the cloud team, in all of its faces. I congratulate the cloud team of WSO2 in developing the cloud middleware platform of the future.

As I work with Stratos and StratosLive, I was managing the StratosLive project code-named as "Mars" project internally. During this, I got a chance to work closely with the devops. I will surely miss Sanjaya and Chamith, the dev-ops. :( I have learned a lot from them, from the cloud infrastructure, managing the production, staging, and dev clouds, patch maintenance, and more. I can say from my experience, that the devops are the backbone of a cloud team. I will miss the cloud room, the hottest spot during the release nights, everyone surrounding Chamith. Sanjaya silently handles an unbelievable amount of concurrent requests from the developers, always with a smile. My sincere thanks goes to the duo. 

As WSO2 was my first job, I wanted to exercise my multidimensional interests and talents in my job. Hence I was also given the opportunity to manage the social media engagement of WSO2, working on the digital marketing strategy, the latter half of 2011, including the LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other online media. I have made a few good friends, from the WSO2 user community during this. My special thanks goes to the cute little family of Marketing team.

At this moment, I wish the WSO2 team good luck, and we will keep in touch. Life is similar to a flight with multiple transits. My journey with WSO2 was remarkable, and I hope the upcoming days will be equally interesting and challenging, towards my next goal. I will keep Llovizna updated on my journey. Feel free to contact me via kk.pradeeban AT gmail.com.