From A/L Maths to Software Engineering: A Non-Linear Path
I did not write code until I was 17. Two years later I am shipping production Laravel apps at Digico Labs while finishing my degree. The plan, the detours, and what I would skip.
From A/L Maths to Software Engineering
I wrote my first line of PHP at 17. Two years later, I am shipping production Laravel apps at Digico Labs while finishing my BSc IT at SLIIT. The path was not linear, and if you are a student in Sri Lanka trying to figure out how to break into software, this is the post I wish I had read.
The plan, such as it was
I finished my A/Ls in the Maths stream at Prince of Wales College in 2022. The conventional advice was: get into a university, study computer science, graduate, get a job. I followed the first half — I am at SLIIT studying Software Engineering — but I diverged on the second half by starting to build real things in my second semester.
The divergence was the entire game.
What actually mattered
In rough order of impact:
- Building real projects for real people. My first paid gig was a WordPress site for a friend's family business in 2022. It paid nothing. It taught me everything about scope, deadlines, and "good enough".
- Picking one stack and going deep. I chose Laravel because the docs were readable and the community was active. For 18 months I refused to learn anything else. That focus got me to a point where I could ship a Laravel app in my sleep — which is what made Digico Labs hire me.
- Working in public. Every project, even the embarrassing early ones, went on GitHub. My portfolio site has live links. Recruiters and clients found me through the work, not through a CV.
What I would skip
- Tutorial hell. I watched maybe 200 hours of YouTube tutorials in 2022. Of those, maybe 20 hours were useful. The other 180 hours would have been better spent building the wrong thing.
- Chasing "the best" stack. I spent a month in 2023 trying to learn MERN because the internet said Laravel was "outdated". It is not. I lost a month I will not get back.
- Ignoring soft skills. I thought being technical was enough. It is not. The freelance gigs that turned into repeat business were the ones where I communicated well, not the ones where the code was cleanest.
The Sri Lanka specifics
The Sri Lankan tech scene in 2026 is small but hiring. Remote-first international companies pay 3–5x local rates, but they want evidence of shipping — portfolios, GitHub, real URLs. Local companies pay less but are more forgiving on experience.
My strategy was local first (Digico Labs), freelance on the side (international clients), and let the international remote offers come once the portfolio had enough proof.
It worked. Yours will look different, but the underlying move — build real things, in public, consistently — is the same.
The non-linear part
I am still in university. I will graduate in 2027. By then I will have three years of professional engineering experience. The piece of paper matters for visas and certain HR filters. The experience matters for everything else.
Do both, in parallel. Do not wait for one to finish before starting the other.