Hello Everyone! Cheers for all, reading this amazing story! You will find about a brilliant opportunity in a couple of minutes, which I’m experiencing today!

How thing got started...

Sustainable Education Foundation(SEF), is a well-known organization established with the aim of uplifting Sri Lankan education. SEF has launched a number of programs to support the Sri Lankan Educational Community starting from school students to postgraduates and researchers.

As an undergraduate at the University of Kelaniya, It was my fortune to hear about SEF and their valuable programs and I had a keen interest in joining & volunteering. A few batchmates were already volunteering at SEF and their exposure and experience were really outstanding. In my second year of undergraduate life, I was privileged to become the chief coordinator of hackX 2019 Inter-University Startup Challenge, one of the most popular startup pre-accelerator in Sri Lanka organized by the University of Kelaniya. There I had a valuable opportunity to work with SEF, get their exposure & experience to drive the event through success.

The ScholarX

ScholarX, one of four flagship programs coordinated and executed by the Sustainable Education Foundation, provides a mentorship platform for undergraduate students in Sri Lanka. ScholarX allows students to connect with industry experts and academics from top universities in the world as well as globally impactful companies and start-ups.

— SEF

ScholarX is one of the brilliant opportunities I’ve been offered in my undergraduate life. As mentioned above it’s an Industrial Mentoring program, which creates an invaluable platform for undergraduates to get mentored by giant brains (and to mentor one day) in the industry, get to know them, expose to their experience, support & guidance towards the success.

I heard about ScholarX when it was first launched in 2019, A colleague of mine, had the opportunity to get selected to ScholarX class of 2019, and his experience throughout the program gave me the motivation to apply for this valuable opportunity. Today I was lucky enough to become a ScholarX mentee for class 2020, as one of the greatest achievements in my life.

Why ScholarX?

If you are planning to have a good mentorship, industrial guidance & support for your undergraduate life, projects, or academic researches and to contribute back to the community, ScholarX is the best opportunity for you.

ScholarX consist of a rich pool of mentors from various industries, researchers, winners all over the world. The most interesting fact is we are given the ability to choose mentors considering our preference in order to deliver the best experience with providing the ability to find the right match between the mentor and mentee to align our academic & professional goals through the program in a fruitful manner. ScholarX guarantees an amazing experience throughout the program which I’m experiencing today!

If you want to find out more, visit ScholarX at SEF Official web site or like their Facebook Page for continuous updates.

Why do you need a mentor?

Well, that’s an easy question to answer. As learners, having guidance from an expert will always help life to be easy, and will lead to think out of the box, get exposed to emerging knowledge & do better.

“Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.”

— John Crosby.

A good mentor can help you to shorten your learning curve, open your mind to new ideas and possibilities, identify opportunities, and advise on how to promote yourself.

My mentor: Mr.Ganindu Nanayakkara

In the SchoraX 2020 program, I was privileged to get mentorship from Mr. Ganindu Nanayakkara, one of the greatest innovators in the country, who is one of the Forbes Asia 30 under 30 in consumer tech, currently working as an assistant superintendent at Sri Lanka Customs. He had massive experience in the industry as a software engineer and has won many national as well as international awards for his outstanding innovations, like the iHelmet.

His story on Readme gave me the right motivation. For a person interested in experiencing new technologies, try to emerge new innovations, introduce them to the world through a budding startup, the exposure which can get from an invaluable mentor like Mr.Ganindu is priceless.

You don’t see the big picture at once. If you understand the fundementals, then it’s easy to build things.

— Ganindu Nanayakkara

The Discussions...

For the past few weeks, I had two mentoring sessions with Mr. Ganindu Nanayakkara, where I learned a lot. Since the first day, he encouraged me to ask more and more questions while expressing his thoughts and experience with his broad knowledge. Entrepreneurship was the major topic we discussed as his thoughts were priceless for a newbie to the Startup eco-system like me. He guided me on how to survive in the startup eco-system, being a blooming startup, how to face challenges, how to understand key concerns and apply them towards success.

There is no short path for anything, especially if it’s a startup. Being only a hard worker also not going to lead you up to the peak. You should understand the market requirement and build the right thing. You should be smart, a good planner as well as a forecaster. Opportunities don’t come following us. You should seek for opportunities, take opportunities, and drive your startup towards success. Understanding the groundwork, the fundamentals, and the basics will be a good foundation for a solid, stable future.
Especially for a startup, having the right business model, market fit, and a well-organized execution plan will be the key concerns of success.

These are only a few key aspects that I have learned from Mr. Ganindu. There is a lot more to share with you. I strongly believe the guidance & Support I receive would help you to fulfill your life goals. If you are an entrepreneur, a thinker out of the box, the upcoming blog articles I’m planning to write including the discussions about the Entrepreneurship & Startups, with Mr. Ganindu, would be really helpful for you. So I‘m planning to share the experience as well as the valuable knowledge & guidance I receive through the ScholarX program with you all through upcoming blog articles.

Important: Become a ScholarX mentee next time!

Now you have read my experience & thoughts in the ScholarX program. I’m still a newbie to the program, and I was able to learn a lot within the past couple of weeks. So If you are an undergraduate reading this, I highly recommend you give this opportunity a try next time.

ScholarX will take you towards the success day by day! Keep in touch with the Sustainable Education Foundation Official web site & the Facebook page for future updates. I wish all of you will be able to have this amazing opportunity which I’m experiencing today!

Have a Nice Day!

Hello Everyone!!!
If you are a developer, undergraduate or a tech enthusiast, who has a thirsty in learning new stuff & to share them with others?? So the first idea comes to your mind should be , Writing a Technical Blog!

But today, most of us find it's difficult to write a blog specially when you are a beginner, not to write, but to create and manage your blog Actually. Thinking of a general CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, Jumla, It's not that easy to configure, write and publish your blogs, specially when it comes to technical blogs, as most of your requirements , you may need to satisfy manually and may need to depend on a 3rd party plugins full of adds, malware etc..

Ghost, is a powerful CMS (Headless), based on NodeJs (JavaScript) which is specially built for developers like you & me.. It can be easily aligned with GitHub Pages, which I'm gonna explain in a minute, and also can be integrated with number of day to day apps we use like slack, trello, google analytics etc.. You can find many tutorials and guides for ghost setup in web.. But I thought to write this as, with recent updates, Ghost Installation and Configuration have been changed and made super easy, and also some Static generator tools and methods introduced in those tutorials seems broken or not properly working now!

So without further Ado, I'll quickly take you through, How I create this amazing Blog with Ghost, wget & GitHub Pages within minutes... Believe me, It's super easy!! And you do not need a coding knowledge at all!

Getting Started..

Note: You can find the complete instructions at the Official Ghost Documentation here

We will follow a few Steps:

1. Installing Ghost CLI Locally
2. Create your blog with Ghost
3. Create a GitHub Repository with GitHub Pages enabled
4. Use wget to Generate Static Version of your Blog
5. Commit and Publish your Blog

To Get Started, first you need to Install Ghost CLI Locally.

To do that, Open your Terminal (Press CTRL+T) and execute following commands

npm install ghost-cli@latest -g

In your terminal, cd into an empty directory and run the install command:

ghost install local

That's it!

Now Ghost has built Locally, it should show you a URL in your Terminal , like the Above figure.

To Run Ghost locally whenever you want, Just navigate to the ghost installation directory and use below command

ghost start

And then go to shown URL. For me, It's

http://localhost:2368/ghost/

You can preview your Blog with http://localhost:2368/

To Edit Posts and Settings, You can navigate to Ghost Dashboard with http://localhost:2368/ghost/

Okay! First Step is done! Now it will show to a stunning, out-of-the-box blog site, with Some pre-created posts (READ THEM BEFORE DELETE) like below!

Ghost Dashboard is really simple & easy to use. It will provide you some in-build articles including all the details you need to configure and customize your blog, how to add posts etc.. (If you are familiar with CMS like WordPress or Jumla, Editing a post in Ghost won't be a big issue :P).

Posts can be created using markdown (md) terminologies. For a developer, a markdown wouldn't be something new right! However If you are a beginner to working with markdown files, below I have provided a few good resources, you can go there & have a look!

The Ultimate Guide to Writing & Publishing with Markdown

Learn every Markdown trick, tip and app that you could ever possibly need. Writing with Markdown is one of the most powerful tools for online writers.

John O’NolanGhost

If you want to remove already available dummy posts and start over, Go to Staff -> Users and remove the user GHOST. Then all the posts created by user GHOST, will be removed!

Creating GitHub Pages Repository

Okay! Now we are ready with out stunning blog site, built locally. Now It's time to publish your blog on GitHub.

For that we need a GitHub Repository with GitHub Pages (gh-pages) enabled.

For your GitHub account, you already have a by default GitHub Pages enabled repository, which can be used as your Home page/ site on GitHub Pages. If you have not yet created it, you can create it by simply adding a new repository with below naming convention.

yourUserName.github.io

You can commit any static HTML,CSS,JS files to that repository and GitHub will host the for free for us, with SSL enabled! Sounds Great! Right?

So I'm not recommending you to put your blog in this repository. You can use this  repository to showcase some important content, as this is your home page ( not just one page, you can include a complete static site there with navigation). For me, as an example, I included my Online Resume there. You can have a look at it by visiting my GiHub Pages Home..

https://cmadusankahw.github.io

So let's create a new repository! I'm going to rename it as blog , so then you can access it on web as follows.

https://yourUserName.github.io/blog

(Note:- You can use any name you want.Once GitHub pages are enabled, you can simply access them in web as yourUserName.github.io/repositoryName )

When creating the repository, make sure to create it as Public Repository, and do not include a README (You can include a README at first, but you will have to do additional steps when setting remote repository, which we do not want to think about now :P)

From here, copy to your Git URL.

Connecting your blog with Remote Repository

Now, It's time to publish what you have done! To do that, got to the directory where you have installed ghost ( You can do this in any Directory, here I'm using the same folder where Ghost installed. It's up to you!) and open a new Terminal Window there.

Execute below command to create a local repository for your blog.

git clone https://github.com/yourUserName/blog.git

That's It! One more step to do!

Generating Static Content with wget

GitHub Pages are amazing! But the content need to be static. That means you cannot put any PHP , NodeJS or whatever dynamic stuff there. they won't work!

So to generate our blog into Static site, we use a powerful, less-error tool called wget, which is shipped along with Ubuntu Distro ( If not you can install it with apt-get easily)

Assuming your repository name is blog, you can execute below command in the same Terminal Window opened inside your ghost installation ( or any other directory you have chosen in the previous step ).

Whenever you add new blog posts, do modifications locally, You have to execute the same command before commiting changes, to generate your whatever modified content to static site!

wget -r -nH -P blog -E -T 2 -np -k http://localhost:2368/

(Note:- If you have created a directory with another name, replace blog with your path to directory in the above command)

Wrapping up...

Then the usual stuff! Let's commit our static blog into GitHub! to do that, navigate to blog Directory in your Terminal and execute following commands.

Navigate to blog directory:

cd blog

To commit your changes:

git add .

git commit -m "updating blog"

git push origin gh-pages

That's it! you have all the above commands this this section to update your blog whenever you have added new post, or modified something!

(Note: When running above commands, If it says that no branch named gh-pages, simply run below command to create a new branch and then execute above 3 commands again)

Note: Optional. If there is no-branch error only

git branch gh-pages

git checkout gh-pages

Great!! That's it! Now within a couple of seconds you can navigate to your Blog!

For mine, it's

https://cmadusankahw.github.io/blog

What's yours?? :)

Thanks for reading! If any issues or clarifications reach out to me through my social links!

Have a Nice Day!

Interested in Developing Mobile apps ? 📱
If yes, this is a good opportunity for you. Attend to our online webinar on Introduction to Mobile App Development with Xamarin on 04th of July 2020, Saturday, 4.00 PM onward via Microsoft Teams!

What is Xamarin ?💻
Xamarin extends the .NET platform with tools and libraries specifically for building apps on iOS, Android, MacOS, and more.

Benefits of Xamarin ?🍀
***A single code for all platforms
***Direct access to the native APIs of each platform
***Usage of the .NET platform and Xamarin language C#, which is quite productive, clear and simple to learn and use

Xamarin is Highly recommended by the professional Developers and undoubtedly one of the leading and powerful tools for mobile engineering available today. It combines the best of native and cross-platform features.

Introduction to Mobile Application Development with Xamarin is organized by me, at Microsoft Students' Club of University of Kelaniya as the third online tec-talk of Dev-Express session series.

Register Now!! Reserve your seat today!!!🚨

Register Now

COVID-19 pandemic influenced in our usual learning process and transformed into online learning.

Microsoft 365 (MS office 365) comes in handy with a lot of advanced useful tools to everyday life like MS word, MS excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and powerful collaboration platforms like Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, PowerBI and a lot more...

MS Project is the worldwide outstanding tool for project management, which is recommended by PMI (Project Management Institute).

Join us and learn how to increase the productivity of your learning process by utilizing Office 365 and MS Project from Scratch!

Increasing University Productivity with Office 365 & MS Project, hosted by me at MS Club of the University of Kelaniya is the second chapter of the 'DevExpress' tech-talk series. Join all the sessions and earn a valuable certificate!

Register to the webinar Now:

Register Now

Update::

Missed the session?

Don't worry! Find the session Recording at Official YouTube Channel of MS Club of University of Kelaniya.

Session Recording

Hey folks!! Welcome back with a new, stunning event in schedule!
Today, Almost every geek (Specially ASP/ .NET lovers) talking about .NET 5, which is about to release mid this year by Microsoft. As we all know, web development has made super easy with the Introduction of .NET Framework  & ASP .NET Core in past years.

.NET Core is an open-source, general-purpose development platform. You can create .NET Core apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux for x64, x86, ARM32, and ARM64 processors using multiple programming languages. Frameworks and APIs are provided for cloud, IoT, client UI, and machine learning. - Microsoft Docs

So are you ready to Next Generation Web Development with all new .NET Core 5?
Are you aware of .NET? Want to familiar with this fascinating framework with the Time Saving, Feature-Rich Visual Studio IDE??

So Here it's your chance! Join with us, to this months' Dev Express online tech-talk organized by me, at MS Club of University of Kelaniya, on Introduction to .NET Core..

Mr. Fiqri Ismil, Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies in 13 consecutive years, is a highly experienced, award winning .NET Developer. Mr. Fiqri will guide to How to get Started with .NET Core from Scratch.. That's not All!! He will take you through a journey of Developing a Real World Application with Database connectivity & Everything in .NET Core within couple of minutes..
That's how powerful .NET Core is!!!

So Why Waiting??
Join us on 22nd April 2020, at 4.30 PM (IST - GMT+5.30 Colombo)

Register now & receive your seat today!!

Register Now

Update::

Missed the Session? Don't worry!
Watch the Session Recording on MS Club of University of Kelaniya Official YouTube Channel here:

Watch Session on YouTube

Hey folks.. Are you interested in Open-source contribution? Find how Version Control Systems(VCS) like GitHub, Bitbucket works, wanted to help the community, earn some recognition? Participate in global programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoc) and expose to new experiences, while winning cash prizes.. BUT STRUGGLING TO FIND HOW TO BEGIN??

Here's your chance! This week I'm organizing an online event on Introduction to Open-source contribution & GSoC, to lighten your path, answer every questions you have!!! In there we will cover A-Z on how to begin your Open-source contribution journey! We'll start discussion from very basics of GitHub to collaborative approach and then we will deep dive into Open-source community, GitHub & your ultimate SECRET PACK to GET SELECTED to GSoC for sure next Time!

Mr. Dinith Jayabodhi, Associate Software Engineer at PlatformOne, and experienced contributor will teach you GitHub from scratch! Then Mr. Ahamed Ifhaam, Software Engineer at Zone24x7, former GSoC delegate, experienced mentor, will guide you on How to begin with Open-source contribution, GSoC and the winning secrets will be unleashed!

Join with us on this March 24, 7.00 PM (IST, GMT+5.30 Colombo)
Register Now!

Register Now & Reserve your Seat!!

## Update::

Missed the Session? Don't worry!
Find the Session recording on my YouTube Channel here:

YouTube Video