I don't come from a technical or an academic background or parents who went to university for that matter. But they always tried hard to give me the best education and I was fortunate enough to take computer lessons as a child. I remember that being my favorite extra class after school. Being in an only girl’s school I specially remember being that kid who acted as "IT support" during the computing period. I also received several awards in computing competitions and exams during school. But the computing domain was not good enough according to social standards in Sri Lanka at that time and I found myself thinking that computing is a man's arena and that being a "Doctor" is the way to go to make my parents proud.
That's how I ended up taking biology for my Advance Level examinations. However, we still had a mandatory computing subject, so we had a computing institution come in to help us through it. I never thought in a million years that the speech given by the founder of this institution would change my life forever.
He was Dr. Dayan Rajapakse, a doctor turned software engineer who elaborated about his journey on becoming a doctor and finding himself trapped in his profession and finally rediscovering his freedom through software engineering. His speech opened my eyes and made me rethink what I actually wanted to do. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t picture myself stuck in a laboratory in a white coat for the rest of my life. I realized that the ever-changing nature of the software world and being able to build something and to see the results immediately is what excited me and that I would never be content doing something monotones. That's when I knew I made the mistake of doing what the society wanted rather than doing what I actually loved and was good at. Unfortunately, it was too late for me to change my major and I had to pay for my mistake with "time". But immediately after the Advanced Level examinations I did a 180 and started pursing my dream in Software engineering.