Writing is a way to program your mind
A long time ago on a university campus far away, a bunch of student journalists toiled throughout the night to publish a weekly newspaper. In this long-forgotten time, powerful computers were not plentiful, printers still used “flats” with the copy glued down, and photos needed to undergo a process called “photo mechanical transfer” - PMT.
Tales under the cat tree features writing by my friends and I, and hopefully, much more: video and audio to follow. When we published the newspaper (The Muse, btw) we were writing for all sorts of people. Therefore, this little webzine is more than articles about tech or our online selves.
Besides non-fiction, travel and technical articles, I explore the fiction that give us inspiration, the stories that make us think, the writing that compels us to action.
Writing is a way to program your mind. When programmers write code, a silicon chip executes it exactly. When a writer brings forward an idea into your imagination, how it is interpreted is down to your wiring. You run both the program, find the bugs and deal with the outcome.
I hope that Tales under the cat tree inspires you, that the writing makes you think, in fact, the only thing I hope it doesn’t do is make you go “meh”.
I want to hear from you. You can subscribe, or you can even email me directly: contact@dups.ca
About Dups (Duleepa Wijayawardhana)
I’m a tech geek who has always been a writer. My love of technology comes from writing. When I was a student journalist, aside from the writing, I was very interested in the form that we published. I learned everything I could about typography, setting and designing newspapers and magazines, to eventually publishing on the web.
Writing online in those days led me to one of my passions —> Roleplaying games. In some way, somehow I ended up falling in love with what writing ends up as —> Data. I also fell in love with how to get data to you —> Programming, followed by the thing that stores all that data —> Databases and lastly, how do we organize and make all that successful —> Companies and business.
I live in Helsinki, Finland and work for Supermetrics where we are building the world’s best Marketing Intelligence Platform. As the CIO (former CTO), I get to work with the most amazing people from over 40 nationalities doing incredible stuff.
As I said, I love games and I love data, so I’ve been lucky to play roles at incredible companies from their formative years to their world domination eras: BioWare Corp—before the acquisition by Electronic Arts—creators of the greatest video role-playing games ever; MySQL AB—before and after the acquisition by Sun Microsystems/Oracle—the creator of the world’s most successful and popular open-source database (at least up to 2017!).
But I guess what I love most is being part of hyper-growth, driven teams whether that’s me joining them or helping to try and create them. So together with some of the smartest people I know, I’ve founded companies with funding from some of Silicon Valley and Canada’s leading venture capitalists and angels. One such, Empire Avenue (acquired by Kred/PeopleBrowsr), became one of the top destinations in the world at the time which tried new ideas around gamifying social media and behaviours around monetizing reputation.
I am a proud Newfoundlander and Canadian first and foremost. I am surrounded by the beauty of Finland every day, where I call home these days. My world view and culinary choices have definitely been influenced by Sri Lanka, where I was born, and my former homes of Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea.
