Meet Our CTO: Dups
By Shelley Osborne
We’ve told you all about our amazing CEO, Jennifer Farris. Time to meet more of our incredible team! First up, our CTO and Lead Developer Duleepa Wijayawardhana.
He goes by Dups. Just Dups. Kind of like Prince, Elvis, or any other celebrity that needn’t use a last name. A glance at his full legal name and you might assume his shortened moniker has more to do with an impressive collection of vowels and consonants placed together than his reputation. But in this case, it’s all about the gravitas. Dups is one of those rare technology types, a renaissance man that just happens to know a lot, about a lot. In a meeting with Dups he’ll make an obscure literary reference, school us on software design, and ask the probing questions that make us realize he’s working on a whole other level.
Born in Sri Lanka, Dups has bounced all around the world. He’s planted roots in Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, and Canada. His career path has seen him work with all manner of burgeoning technology companies: gaming, social media, and database systems. Creating his own startup, Empire Avenue, illustrated the need for early stage companies to invest in robust HR. A natural fit for Farside, we simply call him “The Builder”.
Learn more about Dups in our Q & A:
Name: Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana
Nickname: “Oops”
How did you get started?
My path started in newspaper design. I simply love newspapers and journalism. When I joined The Muse student newspaper at my alma mater (Memorial University) a friend handed me a book on how to design newspapers so that someone read as much as possible. This was 1992 and the web had just begun. So before I knew it we launched that paper on Gopher and then the web. My other passion was Dungeons and Dragons and a friend told me about this company in Edmonton, AB who was producing a game called Baldur’s Gate. I applied and was told I had no skills. So I basically learned everything I could to go work for these amazing people at BioWare.
From there, I went back to my love affair with data and worked for MySQL Ab and Sun Microsystems and finally we created, launched Empire Avenue, got funded and lived the startup dream. The single thread that weaves all of these different places, ventures, successes and failures is people. I’m just thankful that at every stage, like Farside, I’ve had the opportunity and luck of working with and learning from people that are truly amazing, driven and passionate.
Why are you so passionate about changing the face of HR?
I felt my biggest pain point and weakest part in running a startup was human resources. In fact, now advising startups, this seems to be a nearly universal pain point. People make companies, people make products, people innovate, people “make incredible.” Instead we focus on the company, the product, the innovation and hope for incredible.
Reducing the effort and improving how to help people do all those things is what creates true wonder.
What is so different about Farside from all the other tools?
Stop trying to re-invent the wheel. Stop trying to do things 20 different ways with 20 different tools. Think not just about the mechanics but how to make managers manage better and thereby make our companies incredible. That’s FarsideHR for me.
Biggest pain point?
Not enough hours in a day. Mark and I are working on a time machine though.
Typical workday?
Wake up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head
Found my way to the computer, drank a cup
Looking up, I noticed a crash
Found my debugger seconds flat
Solved my problem, had another cup
And somebody spoke and I went into a dream…..
(apologies to Lennon/McCartney)
Favorite Quote?
“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Who was your best manager?
Jeff Wiss at MySQL Ab. He had a cadence and respect for the team, their knowledge and how the team needed to operate that I have seen in very few people and places.
Favorite place to visit?
The Rocky Mountains in Canada and the west coast of Newfoundland.
If you could live anywhere in the world?
Iceland.
Guilty Pleasures?
Harry Potter. Hardy Boys. The Three Investigators. Famous Five. Tom Swift Jr. Darkwing Duck.
Fun fact?
I can do the Schuhplättler …
