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.

Prabath Siriwardena

Engineering

It is always the journey, not the destination.