Change Is Strange

Change is strange. And I don’t like change. But do I really not like change?

This is a question I have been asking myself for a while because I seem to contradict myself all the time. To anyone who seeks my advice, I always say “YOLO”, and personally, I enjoy trying new things and changing for the better. But on the other hand, I walk into a restaurant I have been to before and order the same thing I had before because I know it is the best. Weird, isn’t it?

One thing is for sure though, I wasn’t always into tech. In fact, some of my closest friends, who are just a few years younger than me, used to call me a dinosaur for not knowing where the Task Manager was. During my teenage years, my closest friends, who remain close even now, weren’t the most tech-savvy people either. We shared the same geeky interests, like superheroes and debating. Ironically, two of us would end up working at the same tech company nearly a decade later.

I was exposed to technology at an early age though. We always had two giant CRT monitors that my parents had bought for me and my sister. I still remember the first Dell laptop my father got my sister in 2007, which we shared in turns, and the next upgraded laptop we got in 2013, when the display of the first one had a giant green line running through the middle of it.

I only knew how to use Microsoft Office to write my short stories on Word, keep tabs of cricket scorecards and superhero movies I had watched on Excel, play around with animations in PowerPoint using random photos, and play simple video games. Other than that, as a kid, I was never really into the concept of tech or computing as a career.

So, I guess I changed again?

I had my phases like any child, wanting to work with dinosaurs at first but then realizing Sri Lanka doesn’t really do that here. But something that always stuck with me was that I wanted to be an astrophysicist, a career almost unheard of in Sri Lanka.

I have been a night owl since my O/L days. Coming home late from extracurriculars like basketball or debating meant I got most of my homework and studying done at night. Plus, my love for Batman made me a fan of the night since I was a kid.

My study table was in the living room, next to a small balcony that opened up to the night sky. When I took breaks from studying, I would look outside that balcony and stare into the night sky, looking at the stars and planets with reverence despite the heavy light pollution of the city.

Naturally, this curiosity led to endless rabbit holes of astronomy on the internet and Reddit threads, and constantly nagging my parents to take me to bookstores and book fairs to get me books about astronomy that I would speed-run through. This led to me choosing to do Combined Maths, Physics and Chemistry with the hopes and dreams of getting to NASA one day.

Three years flew by. Juggling hectic A/Ls and extracurriculars at school made me stare less at the sky and more at books and past papers.

Then came the pandemic, when everything came to an abrupt halt.

It was during this time that I started getting into tech, thanks to a friend who was an Apple geek and still remains one to this day. Conversations with him during the pandemic, along with the forced digitalization of everything around me, pushed me to become more curious about it.

It started with comparing different phones and laptops, then looking into why they were different, how apps were made, and what actually ran them. All of this was surface-level “research”, if you can even call it research, but it definitely started piquing my interest.

A/Ls didn’t go as I had hoped, and the textbook path for any kid who does Combined Maths for A/Ls, which was engineering, was out of the way. I was looking for other options. Physical Sciences seemed like a possibility, but all the state university options that I was eligible for were out of Colombo, which I wasn’t a huge fan of, because obviously, I’m not a fan of change.

So then I turned to the options that I was interested in: the previously mentioned astrophysics and computer science.

Soon, I learned something I already knew: astrophysics wasn’t a viable option for someone who was planning to stay in the country. That made me turn to computer science.

I applied to both state universities and one privately owned university. All the state university options returned with options that were far from home, a decision I did not want to take at the time. So I switched to the one option that actually met my criteria: KDU.

I walked there in 2023, dreading everything because, again, I’m not a fan of change.

On the first day of registration, I picked a random seat, which eventually led me to writing this blog today.

The folks I ended up sitting with that day are the very people whose blogs you are reading on this site.

It started with befriending the guy sitting next to me (Tharusha) and soon realizing we shared the same bus route. Then it was just a random decision to sit in the front of the lecture hall that led us to another tall, fair, quiet dude (Hasindu) sitting on his own in the front as well.

And another who was late on his very first day, so he had no choice but to sit in the front (Thenuke).

And another who just spawned in from God knows where, with on-and-off appearances within our newly formed awkward group during the first month, before eventually becoming a resident member (Wageesha).

And I couldn’t be more grateful to have been in their company.

I was still a baby when it came to tech, but Hasindu and Thenuke knew what they were talking about. My whole first year was spent learning from them and everything around me, and even to this day, I still learn something new.

Time changed, life changed. New people got added to this group of ours, but we never stopped being us.

It did not change, just the way I liked it.

When I brought my own additional awesome partner, whom I met under unexpected circumstances, into the group, they were nothing but accepting. She was also a tech whiz who I still learn from to this day (Sumudu).

In our second year, when Hasindu and Thenuke were talking about forming and doing their own thing and asked me to join, I knew it wasn’t just a child’s dream or just words that would never materialize. At this point, I knew it was something they would do.

We were all involved in our first project, and working as a team was different from working as a friend group; it was much tougher. I often accused them of not dividing work proportionately and completing all the work by themselves, which was something they learned to fix with time.

Years went by. I wasn’t involved in much after the initial launch, but I supported them even with just words and tried my best to be there as a friend because I admired it and wanted to be part of it.

With time, I grew to be more tech-savvy. I could figure things out on my own. I started doing research, I started trying new tech, and I signed up for almost every hackathon I saw online.

And you know the best part?

I got to do it with some of my closest friends, and we were good at it.

During our third year, we basically lived off the cash prizes we won in hackathons.

I was glad I had made the right choice.

I was glad I met the right people.

And more importantly, I’m glad that everything that happened changed me for the better.

I spent years thinking I didn’t like change. But when I look back, almost everything that matters to me now came from a change I wasn’t expecting.

So I guess I like change after all.