Catch up with Jaye's Community

Last Saturday (August 1st), I attended a small meetup organized by my friend Jayasanka Weerasinghe (whom we usually call "Jaye") for his Patreon community of professionals. It turned out to be a great event filled with entrepreneurial stories, casual chit chat, and some light brainstorming on the tech stacks and tools each of us is currently working with.

The crowd was a nice mix. There were many young IT professionals (though I might have been the oldest there!), a few undergraduates, and a handful of entrepreneurs quietly vibe coding their own SaaS platforms and side products. I ended up in conversations that jumped from software architecture and career paths to stories about AI and modern tools.

Jayasanka himself deserves a special mention here. He's an IT professional by day and an open source enthusiast at heart. He works at OpenMRS, which is a widely used open source medical records platform that powers healthcare systems in many developing countries. I originally met Jaye through the Tech Track community and quickly became a fan of his YouTube channel because of his engaging way of explaining complex technical concepts. You can find his Sinhala medium YouTube channel here.

It was a simple evening, but a wonderful reminder of how much value there is in just showing up and connecting with fellow professionals who are building interesting things.