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

  • My thoughts on the PayHere data breach

    Yesterday a tweet by Duminda, a fellow developer on Twitter, caught my eye. In that tweet he said that he has been warned by Have I Been Pwned about a data breach at PayHere, an online payment processor in Sri Lanka. PayHere may well be one the largest and most significant data breach to occur in Sri Lanka,…


  • Reddit can’t build a better search engine

    Every week or twice a week, you will come across a post on HackerNews that Google is dying or Google is awful. There are some valid points to some of their arguments. However, I don’t see Google going anywhere anytime soon. Yesterday, I came across a post titled, ‘Google search is Dying‘ and the argument…


  • Ideas that have been beaten to death

    Recently I was browsing Product Hunt and I was aimlessly scrolling down to see if there are any interesting ideas. I was seeing one recurring idea, popping up once in every few weeks. This is the same idea that I see popping up on HackerNews, ProductHunt, IndieHackers every single week. What is this idea? Another…


  • Every organization needs a CTO

    Recently I was shown a product marketing itself as providing geological data layer for apps. A sketchy product at a glance and maybe scammy in the worst case. The developer is unable to provide direct answers and finding it difficult to provide details on how the product really works. They may/may not have developed some…


  • 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…


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

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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.