Tharik Kanaka
Senior Technical Lead at WSO2
Colombo, Western Province, Sri Lanka
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTharik Kanaka is a Senior Technical Lead with 11 years of hands-on experience driving backend and platform engineering at WSO2 and as a lead developer on the Ballerina platform. He specializes in language tooling, build and distribution automation, and stream processing, having contributed substantial refactors and migrations across the Ballerina language, distribution, and website as well as stability fixes for carbon-analytics and Siddhi. A pragmatic engineer and mentor, he progressed through engineering and leadership roles at WSO2 while also teaching software engineering courses as a visiting lecturer. Tharik’s work blends production-grade bug fixes and CI/build improvements with developer experience enhancements—like integrating message brokers and improving build feedback—that often go unnoticed but dramatically ease platform maintenance and release. He holds advanced IT degrees from SLIIT and brings a proven track record of improving test coverage, code quality, and deployment workflows in open-source ecosystems.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bandaranayake College - GampahaBachelor's Degree, Information Technology, Bachelor's Degree, Information Technology at Curtin University of TechnologyMaster's Degree, Information Technology, Master's Degree, Information Technology at SLIIT
Stackoverflow
2,520reputation
273kreached
99answers
30questions
Github Skills (35)
scripting10
testing10
batchfile10
cicd10
java10
javas10
language-server10
script10
api10
language-design10
sh10
batch10
stream-processing10
shell10
ballerina10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
ballerina-platform/ballerina-distribution
Mar 2018 - Nov 2022
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:470 reviews, 1139 commits, 999 PRs in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Tharik primarily worked on build and distribution-related tasks for the Ballerina platform. Their contributions include modifying the build scripts (batch and shell) for the platform's executables, specifically targeting the Windows and Linux environments. They also integrated and configured the message broker within the distribution, and enhanced the build process by incorporating a progress bar. Their work demonstrates a focus on improving the platform's deployment and developer experience.
ballerina
ballerina-platform/ballerina-lang
Jul 2015 - Dec 2022
The Ballerina Programming Language
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:41 releases, 349 reviews, 1742 commits in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Tharik's contributions primarily focused on refactoring and migrating various modules within the Ballerina programming language platform. This included removing obsolete modules related to tracing, diagram, and API design. They also migrated core functionalities of the language server, open API, formatter, and data mapper. Furthermore, the user addressed code style issues, ensuring adherence to coding standards, and removed commented-out require modules.
compilerprogramming-languageinterpreterballerinaballerina-lang
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