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Speaker: Sanjiva Weerawarana, Founder, Chairman and Chief Architect of WSO2
About the talk: This talk is Sanjiva Weerawarana's story of returning to Sri Lanka in 2001, starting an open source foundation, starting a business, joining the army and building software of all kinds. Sanjiva lived in the US for 16 years before that (his entire adult life) and has now been back for nearly 17 years. This talk will discuss his experiences and why he thinks Sri Lanka can easily become a leading technology creating country. He will also discuss how diaspora who genuinely want to, can practically play a role in improving Sri Lanka.
About the speaker: Sanjiva Weerawarana is Founder, Chairman and Chief Architect of WSO2, where he leads the design, architecture and development of Ballerina. After starting WSO2 in 2005, Sanjiva lead the creation of a complete set of middleware products before deciding to throw them all away and start again with a programming language approach. Prior to starting WSO2, he was at IBM Research where he led the development of Web services standards and technologies. He's a long time open source developer and advocate and is a Member of the Apache Software Foundation, an Emeritus Board Member of the Open Source Initiative and Founder and Chief Scientist of the Lanka Software Foundation. He also volunteers in the Sri Lanka Army where he serves as the IT advisor. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 1994.