Udara Weerasinghege

About me
Hello there! My name is Udara and I'm a full-stack engineer with over 5 years of technical experience. Currently, I’m working as a Software Engineer at Square. Previously, I worked at Wealthsimple, Mozilla, and EventMobi. When I’m not working or mentoring, you can find me playing video games, table tennis, reading, and writing.

My Journey
When I was in university I had no idea what to focus on to stand out to employers. I didn’t know how to write a good resume or how to do well in technical interviews. At the end of my second year, I had a terrible GPA, and no experience to speak of.

Luckily, I had several side projects that helped me secure an internship. This eventually led to me dropping out of university to pursue full-time work.

At my first job, I had poor communication skills, didn’t know what to talk about during my 1on1s with my manager, and had no idea what skills I needed to work on other than coding. I went in blind and stumbled a lot. It was by talking to senior engineers, and people that had been in the industry a long time that I finally managed to find my path.

Since I began my career, I’ve learnt and grown a ton. I’ve led large projects spanning multiple teams, become heavily involved in the hiring process at various companies, and remodelled how I approach my career and work. I’ve started a blog, grown my network exponentially, and helped junior engineers develop their skills.

What I can do for you:
My goal as a mentor is to help make your journey smoother than mine. I try to be the type of mentor I wish I had early in my career. To this end, I’ve mentored and advised dozens of students over the last five years.

I can help you:
- ✨ spruce up your resume to stand out in the crowd.
- 💻 assist you with personal projects to advance your technical skills.
- 🎤conduct mock interviews to find areas for improvement and help secure your next job or internship.
- 💸 negotiate your salary (I 5x’d my salary in 5 years)
- 🌐 grow your network by connecting you to folks you’re interested in
- 🎯 set up a career plan work towards it
- 😎 make a great first impression at your first job
- 💼 work towards your next promotion

Frameworks and technical areas I’m familiar with:
- Ruby - Ruby on Rails
- Python - Django
- HTML/CSS/Javascript - React, Node, Angular, Webpack
- sql, git, circleci

If I can help you in any of the areas I've mentioned or just want to chat, please reach out! I look forward to hearing from you!

You can also check out what I'm up to at udaraw.com