Prabath Siriwardena
Engineering
It is always the journey, not the destination.
I come from the south of Sri Lanka, filled with lush paddies where farming was the staple. Now it is one of the metropolitan states. After high school, I joined the University of Moratuwa, where I pursued civil engineering for my undergraduate degree, followed by a postgraduate degree in computer science from the same university. I moved to Silicon Valley in 2015.Even though I did civil engineering for my undergraduate studies, my passion was in computer science. The reason I did civil engineering was because I had no choice. After the first-year exam at the university, we were given an option to pick a new area we wanted to specialize in — and my scores were only good enough to do civil engineering, so I did it! It was the very first significant setback in my Life!
I started finding ways to learn computer science myself so that when I graduated from the university, I could be a software engineer. Unlike these days, we didn't have Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, or not even a broadband internet connection. So I developed a strange habit of collecting job advertisements for software engineers in Sunday newspapers and sticking all of them into a journal. That helped me learn what skills I needed to develop to land a software job.
I worked hard self-studying computer science while doing my undergraduate studies in Civil engineering, only to learn that no software company was even interested in giving an interview for a civil engineering graduate. That was a bummer! I wanted to build a resume that no software company could reject. It took me three months, sleeping about three hours a day, to complete most of the developer-focused certificate programs by Sun (Oracle now), Microsoft, and Oracle. Finally, I re-applied and landed my first job as a software engineer!
That journey I took to become a software engineer taught me not only computer science but also Life. I learned the pain of rejection and how to keep my head high even when nobody wants me!
If I have any success today, that's primarily due to my very first failure in Life as an undergraduate.
In 2007, I joined WSO2 to lead the open-source Identity Server project from zero customers to a 750-plus, zero annual recurring revenue (ARR) to 12M+ USD, zero users to more than 250 million, and from a four-member team to a 100-member team. It's been a remarkably satisfying experience.
I am now thrilled to start the next phase of my Life at DevRev and looking forward to growing from zero again.