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2019/06/09
 
9 Jun, 2019

Women in Open Source Tech Roundup: April and May 2019

  • Vichitra Godamunne
  • Associate Lead Marketing Officer - WSO2

We launched a campaign to celebrate the intelligent, awesome, and interesting personalities behind our technology earlier in the year. In April and May, we spoke to female software engineers, a technical writer, an enterprise architect, and a research engineer to find out how they found themselves where they are today and why they want more girls to join this industry.

This roundup gives you the chance to get to know them better.

Dakshitha Ratnayake

We started April by featuring Dakshitha, an enterprise architect at WSO2’s CTO office. Dakshitha defines success in life as being the ability to juggle both motherhood and career development to the best of her ability. “Keep learning” is her mantra, because change is constant and it’s never too late to learn, adapt, and improve yourself in the long run. When she’s not at work, she loves to run, play basketball, sing, bake, and cook - Dakshitha has a lot going on always!

Some interesting facts about Dakshitha:

  • Pet peeve: Cantankerous keyboard warriors
  • Childhood ambition: To become an astronaut
  • If she weren’t an enterprise architect, she’d be a writer, a chef, or a teacher.

Anupama Pathirage

As a teenager, Anupama wanted to be a hacker. But she became a software engineer instead and is currently a technical lead for Ballerina, a cloud native programming language. Anupama first came across a programming language as a teenager, and she never thought that one day, she’ll be working on developing a new programming language from scratch. Success for Anupama is the ability to be satisfied with whatever we choose to do in life.

Some interesting facts about Anupama:

  • Pet peeve: People who constantly talk about doing something but never take action or follow through
  • Childhood ambition: To become a computer system hacker (of course!)
  • If she weren’t a software engineer, she’d be an entrepreneur.

Sinthuja Rajendran

Sinthuja is a senior technical lead at WSO2. She loves her job as it involves conducting research about current and emerging trends in technology, and advising others in her team. Although she studied telecommunications engineering at university, her true career passion lies in computer science and software engineering. Sinthuja, success is inner happiness - whether it’s following your dreams or you’re delighted that you performed a simple task better than you initially anticipated.

Some interesting facts about Sinthuja:

  • Pet peeve: Expecting great results sans the effort
  • Childhood ambition: To become a pilot
  • If she weren’t a software engineer, she’d be an interior designer.

Yvonne Wickramasinghe

Yvonne loves animals, helping to rescue stray animals wherever she can. She’s passionate about nature, raising awareness on issues such as deforestation and environmental damage. Yvonne is also a technical writer at WSO2. She believes in being true to one’s self to achieve success and advises others to not be afraid of failure. Yvonne thinks that women have a remarkable ability to thrive in fast-paced environments - and sometimes, this can lead to misinterpretations.

Some interesting facts about Yvonne:

  • Pet peeves: Cruelty to animals, deforestation, and destroying nature
  • Childhood ambition: To become a medical practitioner
  • If she weren't a technical writer, she’d be a business analyst or product manager.

Nayantara Jeyaraj

Nayantara (or Taro as she's more commonly known as) loves music, Instagramming, and pop culture. When she was at university, she learnt about the digital divide in today’s world. Eventually, this is what spurred her to become a research engineer so that she can contribute to bridging this gap - in whichever way she can through her work. She encourages others to move out of their comfort zones, keep learning, and introduce new ideas.

Some interesting facts about Taro:

  • Pet peeve: When someone says that they don't like k-pop, even worse, BTS
  • Childhood ambition: To be an adventure-fiction writer
  • If she weren't a research engineer, she’d be a pop-culture content producer at BuzzFeed.

Keep a lookout on our LinkedIn and Twitter pages because we’ll be featuring more of these videos in June. Kudos to Ishara and Vidyas for being a part of this project with me behind the scenes. We’d love to hear from more women who work in open source technology to learn more about your experiences. Drop us an email on [email protected] and [email protected] to be a part of this campaign.

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