Hello there, I'm Visal 👋🏽
(Vi-sah-l)
TL;DR
I accidentally bricked my Mom's Samsung Galaxy SII trying to flash CyanogenMod onto it back in 2013. Had to mess around a lot to fix it. I low-key fell in love with breaking things, but fell even harder for fixing things.
That little disaster kicked off a habit of tearing things apart just to understand how they work. These days I do it professionally. I'm a developer from Sri Lanka, working on React Native, but mostly obsessed with the Apple ecosystem. Nearly five years in across startups, corporate gigs, and freelance work.
Outside 9-5, I am probably working on side projects that probably don't need to exist but are fun to make anyway. Read more about me :).
Experience
Software (Full Stack) Developer
WSO2, Sri Lanka
June 2025 - Present
Currently, as an Full Stack Engineer at WSO2, I'm responsible for maintaining and improving the WSO2 Superapp. Since joining, a few noteworthy improvements are enabling Push Notifications for the app, implementing and phasing out the use of PIIs within our services and app, and the development of a WSO2Con Microapp. More to come xD
iOS Developer
PickMe Sri Lanka
March 2025 - June 2025
As an iOS Developer at PickMe, my proudest contribution is spearheading the design and implementation of a crucial backend-driven form system enabling multi-tenant user sign-up flows across both Android and iOS platforms which aimed 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.
[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.
More About me, my interests and hobbies
Obsessions 🤤
Apart from being clinically obsessed with Apple technologies, I'm also clinically obsessed with planes and the engineering behind them. Don't tell anyone, but sometimes I read books about planes and spend hours watching documentaries about them, especially the engineering.
During my internship, I came across this cool image loading transition in the Wolt Food Delivery app. Turns out, there's this thing called Metal Shaders that lets you do wild visual stuff in apps. At the time, I heard about it, but my frail mind found it overwhelming to learn. Recently, my interest got reignited after seeing the cool things people are doing with them. Will this time be the time I succeed, or will it be a second feeble attempt to conquer shaders? Let's find out xD
Design & Art 💻
On extremely rare occasions when inspiration and the abundance of time intersect, I try to illustrate. Some days I work on creating quirky app icons, 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].
If you want to see what I've worked on, check out the gallery 👇
My "Humble" Gallery 🖼️Educational 📚
I graduated with a Bachelor's 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 to be a student tutor for the iOS Development module. I also ended up authoring and publishing a survey paper titled "Intelligence at the extreme edge: A survey on reformable TinyML" in ACM Computing Surveys, which is apparently a big deal.
Community 🙆🏽♂️
I try to help out in the tech community when I can. Over the years I've mentored 250+ undergrads through the ScholarX program, taught iOS Development as a Lecturer, and mentored students through their Final Year Research Projects. I also hang out on Stack Overflow answering questions in the iOS, Swift, and SwiftUI tags. Mentorship, teaching, open source, if it helps someone grow, count me in.
Outdoor-sy things 🚲🏃🏽♂️🏊🏽♂️
"Active" is my middle name xD. As corny as it sounds, the need to stay active stems from the years spent as a swimmer in high school. I just NEED TO MOVE. I spend some evenings at the running track. Although my days swimming are behind me, my first Ironman 70.3 Colombo in Feb 2026 brought me back into the pool.
Apart from fulfilling my masochistic tendencies, I love things that involve "touching grass". A walk in the park, a hike, the beach, barbeques, you name it, count me in.
Entertainment 🍿
Pokémon and Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA). Period. Both of these are things I enjoyed as a kid. Massive fan of the ATLA series and a huge fan of the Pokémon games. I keep going back to both of these. Talk about nostalgia.
Brain-rot 🥴
I'll admit that sometimes I prefer to be a couch potato, doom scrolling media on X and Reddit. Because of this, naturally, I'm really into memes and meme culture.