About Me
TL;DR
This is a personal story about my life and career. If you're just looking for my technical experience, please check out my resume.
Hey, I’m Lakmal
Over the past 8+ years, I’ve worked across backend development and DevOps. Two areas that feel natural to me thanks to a childhood spent tinkering with Linux on a 500 MHz PC. This blog is where I share what I’ve learned, what I’m building, and whatever I find interesting along the way.
Growing Up
I grew up in rural Sri Lanka, where everyday life was simple but full of lessons. Getting to school meant a bumpy ride with my family of four on a 90 cc motorcycle. It was cramped, but to us, it was normal.
Things started to change after I passed the grade 5 scholarship exam. It got me into a better school, a big step for someone from my background. In school, I joined a small club where we’d fix up old, broken PCs in computer lab, which got me started with hardware, networking, and system administration. I didn’t know it at the time, but that little club planted the seed for everything that came next. That place changed my life—it’s where I discovered my love for tech, met lifelong friends, and even my future wife.
Moving to Colombo
After finishing school, I didn’t get selected for a government university. That hit hard, because that’s what most kids in Sri Lanka aim for. But I wasn’t ready to give up.
With my parents’ support, I moved to Colombo and enrolled in a private university. It was a big leap. I was away from home, struggling with expenses, and adjusting to city life. But in the middle of all that, I got my first opportunity in tech.
I landed a part-time role at Arimac, a local startup doing innovative work in AR, VR, and games. I was focused on the backends for games. I started with PHP but eventually switched to Node.JS, which was a better fit for the high-throughput systems we were building. This was long before modern PHP back then there was no support for asynchronous servers. I wasn’t about following trends, it was about solving real problems. That’s when I really fell in love with Node.js.
Becoming a Software Engineer
Over the next few years, Arimac quickly evolved into an enterprise, and I grew alongside the company. I worked on everything from game backends to enterprise applications for banks, airlines, and telcos. By the time I left, I was leading the enterprise team.
It wasn’t always smooth. I made my fair share of mistakes. Deploying bugs to production, breaking things that worked the night before, you name it. But those were the moments that taught me the most. I learned how to debug under pressure, how to lead a team, and how to make systems reliable.
Next came Prophecy Labs, a Poland-based tech startup. That was my first time working remotely with a global team. The biggest shift wasn’t technical, it was how I communicated. In Sri Lanka, we’re not always encouraged to speak up or push back. But here, I had to. It was a crash course in being direct and taking ownership, and I’m still grateful for that experience.
Then I joined Sysco Labs, one of the most well-known tech companies in Sri Lanka. For a while, things were good. But then came the pandemic, and with it, the economic crisis. Life started to feel unstable again. That’s when my wife and I decided to move abroad.
Moving to Germany
I focused on job hunting in Europe, mostly in Germany and Netherlands. After many rounds of interviews, I managed to land a few offers. Thankfully, having worked remotely for an international team before, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect during interviews.
I eventually joined Oculyze, a company doing exciting work in computer vision. While getting the job offer was a significant milestone, obtaining a visa to relocate to Germany from Sri Lanka was an entirely different challenge. Despite the relocation support, navigating the maze of German bureaucracy was anything but easy.
After eight long months of back-and-forth, both my wife and I finally got our visas. A few days later, we bid an emotional goodbye to our family and friends and made our way to Germany. It was an emotional cocktail, sad to leave loved ones behind, at the same time exciting to start a new chapter!
Where I am now
Now, I’m part of the team at Oculyze in Berlin, working on DevOps and backend systems that power their AI-driven products. I’m helping scale their infrastructure and supporting their computer vision pipeline.
Moving here has been a huge shift. Professionally, I’ve grown faster than I expected. Personally, I’ve adjusted to a new country, new systems, and a new way of life.
The road from rural Sri Lanka to Berlin hasn’t been smooth. But every bump, every wrong turn, every late-night debugging session... it’s all part of the story. And honestly? I still feel like I’m just getting started.
Change log
- 2025-04-21 – Initial write-up