My WSO2 Story

WSO2 celebrated five years last week. I have been with WSO2 for all these five years. I was asked to write my story, for a mini-book to be published. And this is my story...

Samisa's WSO2 Story
Dreams Come True
I joined WSO2 in September 2005. I saw an advertisement in the paper from a company named Serandib Software, and applied, because the company description appealed me a lot. It was about a job with which you could work with open source projects. At the time, having worked for Virtusa for two years, and most of that time on Apache Axis C++ project, I was obsessed with open source. Hence I was over joyed to see this advertisement in paper, as it sounded like a dream come true. In response to my appellation, I got a call from Sanjiva. And I was much more excited to know that I would be working with someone who not only know of open source, but someone who actually works on open source.
When I joined, I got to know, not only that the company name changed to WSO2, but also that there were many more open source giants from Apache Web services projects that were behind WSO2. It was a dream come true to work for this company.

The C Team
My initial task was to develop Axis2 engine in C. We spent lot of time rationalizing why it should be in C and not in C++. Sanjiva's vision was to be able to ebbed the engine within anything written in C. Like with PHP engine, MySQL engine and the similar.
The Java implementation of Axis2 was already underway. However, we wanted to have the same identical implementation of Axis2 in C.
It was a challenging task to keep up with the Java implementation, as the folks were doing rapid changes, sometimes drastic ones, too often. It was like a moving target. The best documentation was the Java code itself. However, we were lucky, that the very folks who wrote the Java code was right there sitting next to us in the office. Nandika, Damitha and myself managed to get something working, thanks to all the help rendered by Java folks.
The help rendered was such that,sometimes I implemented whole specs, without even reading the spec. For example, when I was implementing WS-Addressing, I just spoke to Chinthaka, and looked into his Java code, and did not bother to read the spec.
We got more people into C team, as time passed, and we started on getting the engine embedded into engines. One of our first efforts was to get it to work with PHP engine, and that remains one of the most successful efforts to date.

Beyond Technology
It is not only technology that I learned in the initial years of WSO2, but the people and managerial skills. Advice from both Sanjiva and Jivaka played a major role in that. Some of the key advices that I still remember include:
You got to trust that others will deliver what they are assigned with.
You got to act responsibly, when you are deemed to be a senior person by others.
You cannot be the sole super star and build a strong team. You got to let others also play their super star roles.
The leader should be willing to do the boring work, rather than letting others do the boring bits all the time.
Delegation is key to empower people. Empowering is key to motivate people.
You do not ask for respect, rather you earn it.

Created History
I also cherish the opportunities that I got while working at WSO2, to create history. I was there when the first secured messages were sent with a C Web service engine. I was also there when PHP was used to write completely secure Web services and clients. I still remember the day when the first reliable message sequence was passed between a PHP client and a service. They were all first ever moments. All these were witnessed within the first two years of my WSO2 life. At that time, I did not know, or imagine, that best was yet to come.
With WSO2 Carbon, we redefined the middleware space. And I was fortunate to be part of that team.

Leadership Responsibility
I was surprised when Sanjiva and Jivaka spoke to me in 2008 March, and said that they are going to promote me to the role of Director, Engineering. As always, the rationale, according to Sanjiva, was meritocracy. A breeze of happiness and comfort flew through my chest when he said that they were impressed how I have managed the C team and managed to deliver multiple releases with high quality. But when he next said that, the board has approved my appointment as director, I felt "Boy, this got to be serious than it sounds!" I was happy to accept it, but at the same time, I felt some burden in my heart. How am I going to live up to expectations? It was the steepest challenge that I ever faced in my carrier.
For the a first few months I was struggling within myself to figure out how to go about playing this new role. As most of the other things in WSO2, I had to discover my path, and invent what I had to do. It was an exciting new adventure.
I got to admit, that it was not easy. However, I was fortunate that the effort on WSO2 Carbon was initiated at the same time.

Engineering Marvels
I had the great opportunity of working with everyone in the team, get my feet wet, and play multiple roles and bond with everyone. WSO2 Carbon is a software engineering marvel, not only because of the superior architectural design and implementation, but also because of the limited time within which we delivered it with such quality. Being part of that team is the greatest software engineering experience I got to date. I remember that Azeez mentioning at one point, while this effort on Carbon was going on,that everything seemed "professional". Indeed, what we have built is evidence. I cherish being part of that whole exercise.

People Skills
More than technical skills, it is people skills that I developed, over the past three years. I am grateful to WSO2 that it entrusted me with the leadership role, that I got the opportunity to develop myself into a better leader. While it is a luxury to play a leadership role in one of the most smart teams in the world, it is also one of the most challenging jobs. The exciting part is that life is always full of challenges,every day. You always have an opportunity to invent something new. And that is one of the two key reasons that motivates me every morning to work for WSO2.

The Team
The other key reason that makes WSO2 special for me is the team. When I say the team, it is both the people as well as the way the team operates. I always have the feeling that there is something to learn from others, rest of my team. It might be obvious that when you work with people in the likes of Sanjiva, Paul and Jonathan, who have worked for leading companies for years on many exciting projects, who have worked on leading WS specifications and may open source projects, that you have sea of knowledge around. But it is not only them that you can learn from in WSO2. There are many individuals in the team, who are experts in various domains, and often, some of the best in the respective domains. If you want expert opinion on clustering, security, reliable messaging, SOA, EIP, eventing, governance, or cloud computing, to name a few, they all are just few minutes of walk away within WSO2. However, it is also important that how everyone is willing to share the knowledge, and collaborate with each other; thanks to the Apache way of doing things. We have individuals with best know-how, but we do not have "pig heads".

A Team that Works
Sometimes, it is thought that, if one works hard, that individual is bound to prosper. But in an organization, in a team, if the rest of the folks are missing, while you are willing to work till late and get the thing done, it does nit work out well. Sometimes, people tell me that I work hard, and that I am always there when things are happening. But the reality is that, I could work hard, and work till late, and see that things happen, because others were there, willing to work hard, till things work and till things are complete. WSO2 Stratos is the most recent example, where the team worked day and night, to get it up and running to meet the timeline we defined to go public with our PaaS offering.
When I want help in getting something done, in any time of day, I have never found it impossible to find someone, in WSO2. It is that spirit that brought us so far, and it is that spirit that will take WSO2 to new heights in the times to come. And it is this niche team that keeps me going.


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