Lakshan Perera
I’m from Sri Lanka, a small beautiful island in the Indian ocean. From the days I used internet with a dialup connection on my dad’s computer, I had a dream of contributing to make it better. The most obvious starting point for me was then to learn how to build web sites. So I started off with Frontpage and then caught with the Flash wave. Within couple of years, I gradually moved towards building web applications. Those days I juggled with ASP, ColdFusion and PHP to build crazy ideas I had in mind. Yet, none of those tools and technologies felt right for me to accomplish what I wanted. Just after college, somewhere around 2005 I came to know about Ruby on Rails. My initial reaction was “Wow! This is a great toy, but not build for any serious stuff”. But within couple of days I was completely blown away by Rails’ capabilities. I felt this is the just what I was looking for.
After college, I was selected to University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka to follow B.Sc in Information Technology. My passion for Ruby paid off when Vesess Inc., a Sri Lankan startup with a strong passion for web technologies, offered me an internship within the first year of university. Soon I became the resident Ruby developer at Vesess, and I developed CurdBee, a free online billing application with Ruby on Rails. Though, it started off as a small project, it quickly went off the ground. CurdBee has been featured in popular media such as LifeHacker, CNBC and Mashable. Today CurdBee has a very strong user base of over 8000.
Last Christmas, I organized Ruby Advent Calendar, which featured an article by a well known Ruby Hacker till Christmas. It became really popular among the Ruby community and was featured in RubyInside blog and RailyEnvy podcast.
I have my personal blog at laktek.com and you could follow me on Twitter and my code on GitHub
