My First Publication and My Thoughts on Academia

Few years ago I was someone was not interested in academia, I felt as if people are rehashing the same scientific topic in different ways, or publishing every minute thing just to add up to their pile of publications. I never thought I’d be able to write a publication under 200 words, the very idea of expressing something meaningful in such a short number of words was something that I could not agree with. ...

October 25, 2024 · Rukshan

Google Search Has To Innovate or Die

Google when it first came out as a search engine was innovative in so many different aspects from search engines that preceded Google. From better ranking algorithm over simply counting keywords, cleaner UI with no banner ads or popups, rather than trying to keep users on their website Google just provided a better search experience overall. ...

June 29, 2024 · Rukshan

The Art of Writing Abstracts

I have never been interested in academia and research. I always felt research and academia, or a majority of what people publish is just to fill their profiles with the number of publications. When I think about research, I always think about doing research as something groundbreaking. I remember telling colleagues (and I still do) to read the Page Rank algorithm [link, link 2] publication that formed the backbone of Google search in the beginning. I wanted every research or publication to be something like Page Rank. ...

April 25, 2024 · Rukshan

GitHub Co-Pilot Generating Different Outputs in Different Editors

I’ve not been able to write something new lately, in fact, I think this is the first post of the year. So happy new year 2024, insert :tada: emoji. So I’ve been pretty much busy with work, and travelling, networking at conferences, the usual. At the start of 2023, I had never left Sri Lanka in my whole life, but by the end of 2023, I’d visited 5 different countries, including the US. ...

February 3, 2024 · Rukshan

XForm and XLSFrom Standards are Preventing The Progress of Digital Health

Recently, apart from my work on FHIR and interoperability, I got a chance to work on clinical decision support, healthcare surveys and verbal autopsy. All these clinical decision support, healthcare surveys and verbal autopsies have one thing in common. All three struggle because of a long-forgotten web standard, a pseudo standard and applications that use these standards and do not break away from these standards. ...

October 31, 2023 · Rukshan

I Was Happy, Sad, Lost and Lonely Without a Smartphone at the Same Time

I haven’t posted on my blog for a long time, partly because I have been super busy with my personal and work life. I moved to Switzerland to work as a health informatics specialist for the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, and moving to Switzerland in a very short period has been a change that took some time for me to get used to. There were cultural, administrative, and legal things I had not been used to while in Sri Lanka. I have yet to move to my apartment and live in a studio apartment at the time of writing this. It’s good that I moved to central Europe during the summer and excited to experience my first winter. Now back to what I wanted to tell you about. ...

September 26, 2023 · Rukshan

Is It Time to Open Source SublimeText?

Recently I had to do some text editing and was in need of a text editor that was better than Notepad, and with muscle memory, I went on and tried to download VSCodium. However, the download was like 100+ megabytes in size and since I was using a public internet connection that would make me wait for several good minutes to complete the download. ...

March 30, 2023 · Rukshan

Codeberg a GitHub Alternative From Europe

Recently I started migrating my note-taking from Notion to Obsidian. Obsidian does not offer free syncing between devices and you will have to manually set up a method to sync your notes, either by using something like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Git. ...

October 17, 2022 · Rukshan

The rings of share - the unsolved problem of sharing

Recently (last Saturday), I went to the Colombo Street Food Festival. It was a bit crowded for my liking but had awesome music and good beer. I snapped some photos of the event, recorded some clips of the music, and snapped some more photos with the others who I went to the festival with. ...

September 26, 2022 · Rukshan

Medium and Google is not a good combination

I know this is going to sound just like another complaint against Google, but I want my Google results to be better. ...

August 30, 2022 · Rukshan