Hey there —

I'm Shanaka, and I
build things
with code.

Software engineer in Colombo, 7+ years in. These days I spend most of my time on Enterprise Application Development, AI and machine learning systems and the cloud infrastructure that keeps them standing up — and the rest of it writing and making videos about what I pick up along the way.

I like problems that look messy from the outside and turn out to have a clean shape underneath. Most of what I know came from breaking something first.

Say hello See what I've built
Shanaka Madushanka, smiling, with a lake and hills behind him at sunset.
Somewhere above Kandy, about an hour before the light went.

A bit more about me

I started out as a backend developer who was far too interested in the servers. That curiosity took me through distributed systems, then into machine learning, and eventually into the part nobody really wants to own — the gap between a model that works in a notebook and a system that's still standing at three in the morning.

So that's mostly what I do now. Data pipelines, training and evaluation loops, inference services, and the cloud platforms underneath them. I think a lot about latency, about what things cost to run, and about whether whoever is on call can actually work out what broke. The best systems I've worked on were the boring ones.

The other half is writing and recording. I started doing it because explaining something is the fastest way to find out whether I actually understand it. I kept doing it because the explanations I needed when I was starting out mostly weren't there.

What I work with

Enterprise Application Development

I build scalable, resilient systems that are a joy to work with. I care about the whole lifecycle, from design to deployment to monitoring, and I believe in keeping things simple.

Java · Spring · Microservices · REST · GraphQL · Angular · ReactJS
AI & machine learning
LLM applications, retrieval pipelines, fine-tuning and evaluation. Mostly the unglamorous half — retrieval quality, guardrails, eval sets, keeping the bill sane — because that's usually what decides whether a feature survives real users. PyTorch · LangChain · vector search · evals
Cloud & infrastructure
Multi-region setups on AWS and GCP that don't quietly cost a fortune. Kubernetes, Terraform, event-driven services, and enough observability to prove any of it works. I've migrated monoliths, and I've talked teams out of doing it too early. AWS · GCP · Kubernetes · Terraform
Building software
Distributed backends, APIs and internal platforms meant to be maintained by people who aren't me. Real types, real tests, clear boundaries, CI that people trust enough to actually read. TypeScript · Python · Go · PostgreSQL
Writing & teaching
Articles, videos and the occasional workshop. I try to explain hard things in a way you could act on the same afternoon, which usually means cutting about half of what I first wrote. Writing · video · workshops · mentoring

Things I've built

A few projects that made it past the demo and into daily use.

Smart ERP system

A smart ERP system that streamlines business processes and enhances productivity. It integrates various modules for finance, HR, inventory, and more, providing a comprehensive solution for enterprise management.

  • Frontend
  • Backend
  • CI/CD
  • Cloud

How I got here

  1. 2021 — now

    Senior Software Engineer III @ WSO2

    Worked with various teams to design and implement scalable, reliable, and efficient software solutions. Contributed to opensource projects, enhancing my skills and knowledge.

  2. 2017 — 2021

    Freelancer, Full Stack @ Upwork & Fiverr

    Developed and maintained web applications using a variety of technologies, ensuring high performance and responsiveness. Got a chance to work with couple of interesting clients worldwide, which helped me grow as a developer.

  3. 2017 — 2021

    Senior engineer, Full Stack & Affno Asia Pacific

    Led the development of key features and improvements across the entire stack, collaborating closely with product and design teams to deliver high-quality software.

  4. 2016 — 2017

    Intern Software Engineer

    Contributed to various projects, gaining hands-on experience with software development and collaborating with cross-functional teams.

Things I've written

Usually whatever I've just spent a week being confused by.

Article

What Is the A2A Protocol?

A plain-language walkthrough of Agent2Agent — the open protocol for getting AI agents to talk to each other.

Read it

Say hello

Working on something interesting, stuck on something annoying, or just want to argue about architecture? I read everything that lands here, and I reply to most of it.

You'll get to check it over before anything actually sends.