The Y Z Paradox
An issue that kept me up all night, with no answer. Only to find Claude cracking the case for me.
Rukshan's Blog
Recent content on Rukshan's Blog
Latest posts
Don't Hijack My Mouse Pointer
With vibe-coding, more and more websites I am visiting are changing my mouse pointer
Too Many Tools
If an organization is technical, the managers should be technical.
I love taking notes with pen and paper
I love taking notes with pen and paper, and prefer them over AI pens taking notes for me.
My Friend Circles
I was clearing my desktop recently when I came across a graphic I made couple of years ago to describe people in my life to another friend. How I interpret different people in my life. Looking back at it couple of years later I found it interesting, looking back at the people who came and went in my life.
🌸 Spring and Magnolias
I just wanted to share something that’s not a rant or something technical. Sometimes you have to enjoy the simple things in life. Like enjoying the magnolias blooming in the spring.
North Star
Life is the sum of small changes, compounded.
Are Conference Talks Boring Right Now?
Because of AI, are expert talks and conferences getting boring?
What's The Plural of Moose?
It's a litmus test to check how good a chatbot is.
PS: Souless Vibecoding
Recently I wrote the blog post “Soulless Vibe-coding” which most of my developer friends commented on in person and via email, even though I didn’t share it on HN or social media.
Tech Fallacy
I was reading an interesting post titled “The Stack Fallacy,” which was written 10 years ago and posted on TechCrunch .
Saying no
The importance in saying no to things
2025
2025 year in review
Why Can’t Gemini Generate Images With Transparent Backgrounds?
I tried creating images with transparent backgrounds with Gemini but I was never able to get it working.
Speed
Recently I read this blog post titled “Why speed matters” and, together with a couple of events that happened earlier this week prior to reading the post, I can’t seem to stop thinking about it and thought about writing my own thoughts about it.
Soulless Vibecoding
Even though I use ChatGPT, Claude and other applications, and even Copilot from time to time for coding, I was never a believer in vibe-coding. Even though I use Copilot, I only use it for autocompletion and never use the chat interface to generate some code. I also accept the autocomplete after going through it, and the autocomplete has helped me to code faster and feel like having a pair…
One minute
It's not just one minute
Moving From Zsh to Fish Shell in Nixos Darwin
I was using ZSH with OmhZH for a long time now, but for the last couple of months I was starting to feel ZSH to be slow, like palpably slow.
Introducing the Spark Editor
Introduction Clinical Quality Language (CQL) is a domain-specific language targeted for healthcare. It allows developers to code clinical content mainly data retrieval and clinical decision support logic in a more user-friendly format that is easier for clinicians and guideline developers can read and understand.
🥟 Bun gives me faster build times and smaller docker image size comapred to NodeJS
Bun gives me faster build times and smaller docker image size comapred to NodeJS
No Code Is Wasted Code
We sometimes tend to start projects where we have no idea whether they will work or not.
Leaving Twitter
I was on Twitter for a very long time, even though I shifted accounts and usernames many times, I remember creating my Twitter account way back in 2008 or 2009.
Digital Health Week Australia
This February we had the chance to demonstrate our work in developing and implementing a decision support dashboard for the Ministry of Health Sri Lanka.
Hacking CHT User Interface With Javascript to Format Content
CHT javascript extensions can be used to customize the look and feel of the CHT form
My Favorite Chrome Extensions Are at Risk of Shutting Down
Google chrome is moving to manifest version 3 and so many of my favorite chrome extensions are at risk of shutting down
Moving My Blog To Hugo
I have been blogging for nearly 15 years now—gosh, I feel so old. Like most, I started on Blogger and then moved to WordPress.com. From WordPress, I moved to Tumblr, to Medium, and to Jekyll for a short period and then a self-hosted WordPress. Sometimes, I wonder why Google is still keeping Blogger alive. I know people are still using it. But Google killed Google Reader when people were still…
How to Attended Your Next Conference for Free
Attending a conference can be an expensive thing to do, with lots of expenses, for example, the travel cost, the ticket for the conference, the food, and lodging are some of the main expenses you will have to pay, on top of that there will be hidden small expenses that will add up at the end of your tour.
My First Publication and My Thoughts on Academia
Few years ago I was someone was not interested in academia, I felt as if people are rehashing the same scientific topic in different ways, or publishing every minute thing just to add up to their pile of publications. I never thought I’d be able to write a publication under 200 words, the very idea of expressing something meaningful in such a short number of words was something that I could…
Google Search Has To Innovate or Die
Google when it first came out as a search engine was innovative in so many different aspects from search engines that preceded Google. From better ranking algorithm over simply counting keywords, cleaner UI with no banner ads or popups, rather than trying to keep users on their website Google just provided a better search experience overall.
Geneva Digital Health Day 2024
The month of May ended me attending the Geneva digital health day, and event following the Geneva health forum. The event was at Campus Biotech, where people get together to talk about the future on digital health.
I'm Trying to Avoid AI These Days
I feel as if the AI hype has peeked, and I am very skeptical about the AI wave that’s happening where majority of the ideas are chatGPT wrappers.
/ About Me
Hello, I’m Rukshan. People call me Shan / Ruky. I hope you enjoy reading my blog as much as I enjoy writing,
The Art of Writing Abstracts
I have never been interested in academia and research. I always felt research and academia, or a majority of what people publish is just to fill their profiles with the number of publications. When I think about research, I always think about doing research as something groundbreaking. I remember telling colleagues (and I still do) to read the Page Rank algorithm [ link , link 2 ] publication that…
GitHub Co-Pilot Generating Different Outputs in Different Editors
I’ve not been able to write something new lately, in fact, I think this is the first post of the year. So happy new year 2024, insert :tada: emoji. So I’ve been pretty much busy with work, and travelling, networking at conferences, the usual. At the start of 2023, I had never left Sri Lanka in my whole life, but by the end of 2023, I’d visited 5 different countries, including the US.
XForm and XLSFrom Standards are Preventing The Progress of Digital Health
Recently, apart from my work on FHIR and interoperability, I got a chance to work on clinical decision support, healthcare surveys and verbal autopsy. All these clinical decision support, healthcare surveys and verbal autopsies have one thing in common. All three struggle because of a long-forgotten web standard, a pseudo standard and applications that use these standards and do not break away…
I Was Happy, Sad, Lost and Lonely Without a Smartphone at the Same Time
I haven’t posted on my blog for a long time, partly because I have been super busy with my personal and work life. I moved to Switzerland to work as a health informatics specialist for the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, and moving to Switzerland in a very short period has been a change that took some time for me to get used to. There were cultural, administrative, and legal things I…
Why We Need Interoperability and HL7 FHIR
I was lucky enough to attend the DHIS2 annual conference at the University of Oslo last week, where I was able to meet experts from all around the world in digital health to discuss not just DHIS2 but also FHIR and interoperability in general.
Is It Time to Open Source SublimeText?
Recently I had to do some text editing and was in need of a text editor that was better than Notepad, and with muscle memory, I went on and tried to download VSCodium. However, the download was like 100+ megabytes in size and since I was using a public internet connection that would make me wait for several good minutes to complete the download.
How to Correctly Load Your Country in to Apache Superset
How to add a missing country map to Apache Superset
Installing DHIS2 on a Windows Server
Recently a college contacted me asking how they can install DHIS2 on a Windows server which they have just received on their premises. Since most tutorials available on the internet discuss installing DHIS2 on a server running a Linux distribution, he was finding it difficult to follow the steps outlined in those tutorials.
Running a Local HAPI FHIR Server For Testing HL7 FHIR Requests
When implementing FHIR, a FHIR server is essential for validating and process incoming FHIR requests from clients. Also, it will be the place where you store your customized profiles, valuesets, and codesystems that is necessary for managing terminology.
Installing Apache Superset Version 2 on Ubuntu Without Errors
Apache Superset is a great free and open-source software released by the Apache foundation for advanced data visualization and exploration. Unlike proprietary tools for data visualization, Apache Superset adds value for an organization as free and open-source software.
Codeberg a GitHub Alternative From Europe
Recently I started migrating my note-taking from Notion to Obsidian. Obsidian does not offer free syncing between devices and you will have to manually set up a method to sync your notes, either by using something like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Git.
The rings of share - the unsolved problem of sharing
Recently (last Saturday), I went to the Colombo Street Food Festival. It was a bit crowded for my liking but had awesome music and good beer. I snapped some photos of the event, recorded some clips of the music, and snapped some more photos with the others who I went to the festival with.
Medium and Google is not a good combination
I know this is going to sound just like another complaint against Google, but I want my Google results to be better.
The Sri Lankan Data Protection Act, And Its Impact on Digital Health
The data protection act in Sri Lanka is a highly awaited and timely act to enable data protection in Sri Lanka. It was passed in the parliament on 9th March 2022 [1]. Even though there are similar acts to protect personal data in other countries such as the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) since 1996 and the GDPR (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)…
People who don't use RSS don't know what they are missing out.
RSS is a great piece of technology that people who use the internet today are unaware of or not using. There has not been any significant development in RSS for the last 10 years, and that’s fine.
Designing is easy, implementation is hard
Sri Lanka is facing a never before seen fuel crisis due to the nation’s foreign exchange crisis. While scrolling through my Twitter feed, I came across a tweet from someone suggesting why no one is creating a database to track fuel distribution, accoring by doing that fuel can be distributed equally among everyone, and prevent hoarding and black markets.
Cryptocurrencies have broken almost all of their major promises
The crypto market has not been kind to “investors” lately. The market has been near free-fall, and within the first quarter of the year, we’ve seen so many things going south about cryptocurrencies, and it seems almost all the promises that BitCoin and cryptocurrencies promised were a lie. So what are these promises that cryptocurrencies have failed to deliver?
I'm Switching from VS Code to VS Codium
VS Code has been my primary text editor/ IDE for several years. “Brackets” was my initial IDE for web development, then I moved to “Atom” and ended up with VS Code.