Hi there!

My name is Rukshan, a wonderer, blogger, occasional coder and a health informatics guy.


I’m Rukshan Ranatunge, currently following my Master’s of Science degree in the field of Biomedical Informatics. I’m interested in digital health systems and achieving interoperability between digital health systems.

This is the place where I write about my musings in my everyday life, tutorials, adventures and misadventures, hot takes and everything in between. If you find my writing helpful, please leave a comment.

Latest musings

  • A basic introduction to Git

    GIT is a part of the toolkit of every good developer. Just like the terminal, you should be good at GIT. Yes sure you can develop without GIT, but learning GIT is a must if you are working on a large project with multiple developers, or if you are working on an open source project. […]


  • Aren’t we all professional Googlers?

    Recently I was recommended a YouTube video titled “How to Google like a senior software engineer”. It was showing some Google dorks to filter out results so you can find the exact solution that you’re looking to solve your problem. While watching the video, I thought to myself, aren’t we all professional Googlers? If we […]


  • Work on interesting problems. Not interesting technologies – Part 2

    Recently I wrote a short post about why you should work on interesting problems instead of interesting technologies. I never thought that it would reach front page on HN and receive so many responses. Since I wrote that post in a hurry, I think there are some points that I missed, and some clarifications I […]


  • Work on interesting problems. Not interesting technologies.

    When I first began learning programming with basic and pascal, our computer class started teaching us Java. As for a 10 year old it was hard for me to grasp the concept of object oriented programming. It took me another 10 years to partially grasp the concept of OOP, and another 10 years to completely […]


  • When I used to collect computer viruses

    Today I was having a lecture about information security and information security law. I just started the module and this is the third lecture about the topic. And todays lecture was about different IT threats that an health information system would face. The lecture mainly revolved around malware. During the lecture, the teacher told a […]


  • Trying to be a project manager

    I have always been a solo developer, trying to create something for fun, for myself, trying to get something off the ground, whatever programming I do I did it by myself. Recently I got involved with the COVID-19 HIMS program as a volunteer to contribute to the open source program. The COVID-19 HIMS will be […]


  • I used to love Bootstrap. God, now I just hate it

    I have been using Bootstrap since it was version 2. At the time Bootstrap was an easy way to set up a responsive website. And also it made your life so much easier and developing a decent website became easier thanks to the styled elements they provided. At the time Twitter and several other popular […]


  • How to setup SCSS on your computer

    SCSS is a CSS pre-processor. By using a pre-processor like SCSS you can easily write simple and elegant CSS. You also have added advantage of variables, arithmetic operations and more. And overall writing sass can be more productive than writing simple CSS. Even though SCSS is similar to css and even though you can write […]


  • Install a Community Server On VSCode

    In my previous post, I wrote about how I manually deployed a working GlassFish web server for Java based web apps. In this post I want to expand on it, and also give some updates, since I’m writing these posts while I’m learning. Moving to Payara from Glassfish Even though I was able to successfully […]


  • How to setup Glassfish server for Java web app deployment

    How to setup Glassfish server for Java web app deployment

    Recently I had to locally run a JavaEE web app so I can contribute to the project. However, it was my first time trying to run a Java web app locally, or even remotely. I know it was easy to deploy it using NetBeans because it has been developed with NetBeans and Glassfish. However, I […]


My Story

Read more about the guy behind this blog and what I’m up to.

Reach Out

I’m open to work on challenging projects in digital health.

Get Social

Let’s get social, follow me on Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram and LinkedIn.

My Work

National Covid Health Information System

I helped in development and implementation of the National Covid Health Information System

FHIR Implementation

I’m currently engaged in implementing FHIR standards for the Ministry of Health Sri Lanka and achieve interoperability in healthcare.

Sri Lankan Open Data Portal for Health

I’m currently designing and developing the Open Data Portal for Health In Sri Lanka as part of my Master’s thesis.