About
I’m Wathsala Gamarachchi, a software engineer in Sri Lanka. I work across the stack on business web applications: C# and ASP.NET MVC on the server, Razor, JavaScript and jQuery in the browser, MySQL underneath, and Azure DevOps pipelines getting it all to production.
My degree is in Management Information Systems, which is half computing and half the organisations that use it. That pairing stuck. When I pick up a ticket I want to know what the code does, but also why the feature exists and what the person on the other end is trying to get done.
A lot of my time goes into software that already exists — reading code I did not write, following a bug from the interface down to a query, and making a change that fits the system rather than fighting it.
Lately I have been going deeper into the data layer — Python, PostgreSQL and the tooling around data pipelines — because every application I have worked on is only as good as the data underneath it.
2020
I started with Management Information Systems, a degree that sits between technology, information and business. It gave me an early interest in understanding not only how software is built, but why a system exists, what information it needs, and how that information moves through an organisation.
2021
Database schemas, backend logic and interfaces, across whatever stack a module asked for — C, Java and Spring Boot, Laravel, the MERN stack. Building something turned out to be one part of the job; making it usable and maintainable was a different one.
2023
Joined as an intern and stayed — through a junior role to software engineer. Real products, real users, and codebases older than my time there. It taught me that strong engineering is mostly understanding: the product, the existing code, and how data moves through the system before you change it.
2024
My dissertation looked at post-harvest loss in Sri Lankan agriculture — interviews at the market and with experts, then the design of a sensor-to-dashboard system. It was my first project where the quality of the data decided whether the system would be useful at all.
Now
Day to day I work across the stack on .NET applications. Outside work I am learning the data side properly — Python, PostgreSQL, orchestration and modelling — because the applications I build are only as good as the data they sit on.
Not a methodology. Just the order I keep coming back to, and the reason the second step is the one I skip at my peril.
01
What is the actual problem, and who has it? Read the ticket, then talk to whoever wrote it.
02
Trace the existing code and data before changing either. Most bugs make sense once you see the path.
03
The smallest change that solves it properly, in the style of the code around it.
04
Tests where they earn their keep, logs where they do not, and a real run through the UI.
05
Through the pipeline, never around it.
2020 — 2024
NSBM Green University · Second Upper Division
A four-year degree split between computing and the organisations that use it — programming, databases, systems analysis and design, software engineering, enterprise architecture, data warehousing and IT project management.
Alongside the degree I volunteered with the IEEE Student Branch at NSBM — organising Duothan, the branch’s coding competition, helping run IEEE Day and student sessions, and serving on the executive committee.
A fast query against the wrong model is still the wrong answer.
A demo nobody needed is a tutorial, not a project.
If the next person cannot read it, I have moved the problem, not solved it.
I use AI assistants to review and explore. I do not ship code I cannot explain.