Hi, I'm Visal 👋🏽
I'm a passionate iOS Developer hailing from the pearl of the Indian Ocean - Sri Lanka. With nearly 5 years of experience across corporate environments, startups, and freelance projects, I focus on creating beautiful, intuitive, and high-performance mobile applications for the Apple ecosystem. I thrive on R&D challenges, constantly exploring Apple's latest technologies to build exceptional user experiences.
My technical toolkit includes SwiftUI, UIKit, CoreData, Firebase, and various API integrations. Beyond development, I'm deeply committed to knowledge sharing – contributing regularly on Stack Overflow, mentoring students, and publishing research in recognized journals. This balance of technical expertise, innovation, and community engagement defines my approach to software development.
[Indie App]
🗒️ Enki - Sticky Notes for the internet age
A zero-friction bookmarking solution that serves as sticky notes for the internet age, allowing users to instantly save and effortlessly rediscover content using conversational AI.
My responsibilities: Led end-to-end product development from design to deployment, including feature integration and implementation. Spearheaded marketing initiatives that drove user acquisition to 1,000+ users within days of launch.
[Pet Project]
💨 Glideshow
Inspired by the slideshow feature in the Wolt iOS app, I built a reusable slideshow library for UIKit during my internship-just for fun and to explore custom UI development.
⏱️ Projects in Motion
Here are some of the other projects I'm working on.
Badger Reminders
[iOS]
One reminder may not cut it for most of us. Badger is a to-do/reminder app that will intelligently and persistently "badger" you to complete a task
NoFace - AI video generator
[Web]
Developing the frontend to generate AI generate short form video content from video transcript generation all the way to video upload to multiple platforms (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram)
Blurvid
[iOS]
Developing an app that records videos using slow shutter speed techniques, primarily intended for low-light or night environments. The goal is to produce footage featuring natural light trails and motion blur, creating a distinct nostalgic aesthetic while preserving high video resolution.
Experience
iOS Developer
PickMe Sri Lanka
March 2025 - Present
Currently, as an iOS Developer at PickMe, I'm taking the lead on significant feature development. I spearheaded the implementation of a crucial backend-driven forms system designed to enable dynamic user sign-up flows across both Android and iOS platforms, aiming to streamline the user onboarding experience. Alongside this, I've been instrumental in the modernization of the Driver app, contributing key components and enhancements using SwiftUI to improve its interface and overall performance.
Software Engineer I (iOS)
Circles.Life Singapore
July 2022 - April 2024
As a Software Engineer I at Circles.Life in Singapore, I played a key role in modernizing the iOS application by leading the migration of over 10 core legacy Objective-C/UIKit views to Swift using both UIKit and SwiftUI. I also contributed to improving code reusability by creating a dedicated SwiftUI library for JSON-based text styling. Beyond feature development, I took ownership of managing the Bitrise CI/CD pipelines, specifically tackling challenges with non-Rosetta Xcode stacks, and gained valuable leadership experience by mentoring a junior iOS intern for a year.
Intern/Associate iOS Developer
ThinkSmart Solutions
June 2020 - August 2021
Assisted senior developers in building and testing iOS app components. Gained hands-on experience with Xcode, Interface Builder, and version control (Git). Created Glideshow, a UIKit Slideshow library inspired by the Wolt App. Maintained, Fixed bugs and contributed to UI implementation.
More About me, my interests and hobbies
Technological 💻
Apart from being clinically obsessed with Apple technologies, I am also clinically obsessed with planes and the engineering behind how planes work. I could go all day about both of them. After hours, I occasionally try to illustrate—meaning, I often create quirky app icons for both mine, and other clients' apps—which I enjoy very much [🔗 Badger]. My okay-ish eye for design has also helped me make cool launch videos for my products. If that's something you are interested in, hit me up [🔗 Enki Launch Video][🔗 Badger]
Educational 📚
I graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science back in 2022 with a First Class. If the technological section didn't scream "nerd", I bet this section just might. In College, I actively participated in hackathons, and most notably, ranked Top 20 in a Global Flutter Hackathon (Hack 2020) organized by Google. During my final year, I also got the fantastic opportunity to be a student tutor for the iOS Development module. Another momentous achievement was authoring and publishing a survey paper titled "Intelligence at the extreme edge: A survey on reformable TinyML" in one of Computer Science's most prestigious journals - ACM Computing Surveys.
Community 🙆🏽♂️
I'm passionate about contributing to the tech community and helping others grow. This passion has led me to mentor over 250 undergraduates through the ScholarX program, teach iOS Development as a Lecturer, and mentor students through their Final Year Research Projects. I also actively share knowledge online as a Contributor on Stack Overflow within the iOS, Swift, and SwiftUI tags. Whether through mentorship, teaching, answering questions, or contributing to open-source projects, I believe in the power of collaboration and shared learning within the developer ecosystem.
Activities 🏊🏽
When I get tired of being a couch potato, I do enjoy going out for a run. Running aside, I love (almost all) outdoor activities. It could be for a walk in the park, go for a hike, walk on the beach, barbeques, you name it, count me in.
Meme-ology 🥴
I'll admit that sometimes I prefer to be a couch potato, doom scrolling media on X and Reddit. Because of this, naturally, I have a great affinity towards memes and meme culture.