Enter Uchitha

Hello everyone, its my first entry in this group blog :) (Is there such a thing as group blog anyway?). So I'm uchitha and my task is to make the mentoring programme of my colleague bloggers an enjoyable and a learning experience. Since I was also a graduate at the same faculty same department 3-4 years back I have a good chance of doing it. Do I?

So I'm mainly involved with software development, design at my current work place. I also enjoy a lot in the areas of software process, software people mgt and of course career guidance and mentoring.

Again welcome all of u and take maximum u can from this programme.

As a start I'd just point you to 3 blogs which are being (rarely) maintained by 3 of us at Eurocenter.

1. My Blog
2. Our Architect & my friend Hasith's blog
3. Our colleague & my friend Chamindu's blog

Cheers everyone!

what a day!

It all started when I gave Uchitha a call to arrange a meeting. It was arranged to have our first ever meeting on the 15th of June, Friday at 5.30 p.m. at McDonalds, Kollupitya. When we were about to leave the university, we got a message form Nirathan saying that he couldn’t make it. So the group of 4 took of from the university about 4.15 p.m. We were there on time……rather……ahead of time. We were in front of McDonalds at 5 o’clock sharp. After waiting for a little while I called Uchitha saying that we had already arrived. He told us to wait a few minutes. So we waited. Then again I got a call from him asking whether we could come to the office. After listening to the directions, my team members and I started off to find the company, with words like Abans, Beverly Street, temple, orange coloured building ringing in my mind – which were some key words on the “Road to Eurocenter”. We went along Walukarama road and turned left as there was an Abans outlet on the left. We passed Beverly Street but didn’t find a temple. We asked a three-wheeler driver whether there was a temple around there, but he said no. So we set off hunting for an Orange coloured building. Sure! There were a lot of buildings but not a single orange coloured one! So we walked back to Abans and I gave Uchitha a call stating that we were in front of Abans. Then he suggested that we should meet at McDonalds after all. So he told us to stay where we were. We walked back to Wlaukarama road and stopped near Mahanama College. Then I gave another call (Ouch! my credits were going down and down….). I told him that we were in front of Mahanama College. Then he told that we seemed to be roaming all over the city and asked us to stay where we were. Just then a guy appeared out of nowhere asking whether we were from UoM. So that is how we met our Mentor. Then we all walked back to McDonalds have a meeting. Uchitha bought all of us Coke (stating that he hadn’t money to buy anything to eat) and we officially started the first meeting. We all got to speak about ourselves. We all got very friendly in a moment- Uchitha being a UoM graduate and a bit closer to our age made this much easier. We discussed a little bit about the agenda. Then He asked us to create a blog for our mentoring group. The responsibility of that was handed over to Amila and Jayantha. Then we tried to plan a day for our next meeting but with Nirathan not being there, it seemed to be a little difficult because we were not sure of his group. As it was getting dark we adjourned the meeting for that day, promising that we will contact him to arrange the date for the next meeting. All in all everything went fine and we all went home with high expectations of having a great mentoring programme.

Uchitha

Our First Meeting

We had our first meeting with our mentor on 15^th of July.

We were asked to come to McDonalds at 5.30 p.m as the meeting rooms were busy at the time being.

But on that day we arrived somewhat early so we had to, walk to the Eurocenter which had a ten minutes walk from there.

We couldn’t find the place so our mentor had to come searching for us, and we went back to the McDonalds.

First session was an Ice Breaking session.Our mentor was Mr.Uchitha Ranasinghe ,Technical Leader of EurocenterDDC, and of course a graduate from Univerity of Moratuwa. He is from CSE family ,so indeed a big brother of us. First Uchitha gave a little introduction about himself. He has graduated in 2004,worked in Virtusa before moving in to the current working place. He told us about the past days in the campus, about activities they did, heroes they had, and also about the period that CSE was the best among the rest.

Then we had to introduce about ourselves.

After that we had some sort of future planning session. We told him about the activities other colleague groups have had with their mentors. Some mentors have asked to do some presentations, some have taken a tour around several companies, some have prepared interview sessions for the mentoring groups. We were asked to prepare a blog or a forum to submit our ideas and plans about our programme, and also to prepare an agenda for the meetings.

We had some discussions about our next meeting. It was easier for him to have it on evenings. We couldn’t fix a date for the next meeting at the meeting, so we will have to contact him the next week.

We had a nice time with Uchitha(thanks for the treat Uchitha!!), and really it was very glad to meet someone from the CSE family. We spent almost about 2 hours. We stopped our meeting at about 7.30 pm.