Lilan Anjana Fernando is Excited About New And Upcoming Programming Languages

Lilan Anjana Fernando from United States has been nominated for a 2020#Noonie in the Future Heroes and Technology categories.

The Noonies are Hacker Noon’s way of getting to know — from a community perspective —  what matters in tech today. So, we asked our Noonie Nominees to tell us. Here’s what Lilan had to share.

1. Which 2020 Noonie have you been nominated for?

Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year - MICROSERVICES

2. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Anjana is a Director of Developer Relations at WSO2. He has built up the expertise in data analytics and enterprise integration by leading several products at WSO2. He has also helped numerous customers in implementing their integration strategies. His latest venture is his role in the Ballerina project, where he has been involved extensively in the design and implementation of the language and its runtime, and now primarily works on its ecosystem engineering and evangelism activities.

Anjana presents frequently in events, such as DevOps Pro, ApacheCon, API World, WSO2Con, KubeCon, BallerinaCon, DeveloperWeek, and many tech meetups. He is also the author of the very first Ballerina book: https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ballerina-Programming-Novice-Professional/dp/1484251385/.

3. Tell us about the things you make / write / manage / build.

I mainly write about the Ballerina programming language, in relation to microservices development, integration and cloud-native technologies. I've got involved in Ballerina's early engineering efforts, and then later moved on to a developer evangelism role in the same.

4. What are you most excited about right now?

I'm excited about new and upcoming programming languages, Ballerina, for network-aware programming, and Rust as a C/C++ replacement!

5. What are you worried about right now?

People over-using microservices with respect to monoliths. It's not suitable for everything.

6. What's the most useful advice you've ever given somebody?

Don't be scared to question on what you believe in.

7. How has the pandemic changed your life and/or career?

Not much, I can perfectly work from home, miss the human interaction, but the reduction of time for the commute is a plus.

8. If we gave you $10 million to invest in one thing right now, where would you put it?

Possibly an area in medical research

9. What's an opinion you have that most people don't agree with?

I can't say it here!

10. Which apps can't you live without?

GMail, Google Maps

11. What are you currently learning?

Rust, Embedded development

For much the same reasons Hacker Noon decided not to put good ideas behind pop-ups or paywalls — nor abuse your personal data to target you with creepy ads — we also decided that you don’t have to be a #thinkfluencer or have 50k followers on Twitter to earn the recognition that comes with a 2020 Noonie Nomination. 

Make somebody’s day and nominate them to be recognized in the internet’s most independent and community-driven awards: NOONIES.TECH.