Official UoVT Web Application
Full-stack migration and production infrastructure for the University of Vocational Technology's official web platform, inaugurated by the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka.
Role
Web Team Lead
Institution
University of Vocational Technology
Timeline
Jan 2026 – Present
Tech Stack
Overview
The University of Vocational Technology required a high-stakes digital overhaul of its official web presence. With a nationally visible launch mandated by the Prime Minister's office, there was zero tolerance for failure.
I served as Web Team Lead, coordinating a student engineering team and owning the production infrastructure end-to-end, working under the technical guidance of Mr. Viraj Shakya Samaranayake (Lecturer & Tech Lead).
The Challenge
The university's legacy WordPress system had become a critical liability. It could not scale for peak admissions traffic, lacked modern security hardening, and relied on fragile, manual deployments. The system needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, not incrementally patched, to support a production-grade institution with thousands of concurrent users and a national public launch date that could not slip.
My Role
I served as Web Team Lead, coordinating the student engineering team across the full delivery lifecycle, from sprint planning and Git workflow governance to production deployment and launch-day incident response. I worked under the direct technical guidance of Mr. Viraj Shakya Samaranayake (Lecturer & Technical Lead), who oversaw architectural decisions. My primary ownership areas were production infrastructure, deployment automation, and system reliability.
Architecture & Modernization
The migration from WordPress to Next.js was a deliberate architectural decision driven by three requirements: server-side rendering for SEO performance, static generation for high-traffic resilience, and a typed TypeScript codebase to enforce long-term maintainability across a rotating student team. This foundation allowed us to dramatically reduce time-to-interactive and enable scalable, component-driven development.
Infrastructure & Security Hardening
I provisioned and hardened Ubuntu Server production VMs, enforcing SSH key-based access, disabling root login, and applying OS-level firewall rules via UFW. Nginx was configured as a reverse proxy handling SSL termination via Let's Encrypt, HTTP security headers (HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, CSP), and efficient upstream routing, establishing a strong, auditable security posture.
CI/CD & Deployment Automation
I designed a GitHub Actions-based deployment pipeline that automated build validation, environment-specific configuration injection, and zero-touch production deployments triggered on merge to main. This eliminated manual SSH-based deployments and enforced a consistent, peer-reviewed release process across the team.
Launch-Day Reliability
On the day of the Prime Minister's inauguration, I managed live deployment cycles, monitored real-time system health via Grafana dashboards, and executed rapid hot-fixes under pressure. The system maintained full availability throughout the national launch event and all subsequent post-launch traffic peaks, delivering on the university's promise of a robust, production-ready platform.
Engineering Leadership
Beyond infrastructure, my role required cultivating engineering discipline across a team of student developers. I implemented structured Git workflows (feature branching, PR reviews, protected main branches), enforced Clean Code standards through mandatory code reviews, and ran daily standups to maintain delivery momentum, keeping technical debt in check throughout the project lifecycle.
Acknowledgments
The technical architecture and system design were guided by Mr. Viraj Shakya Samaranayake, whose mentorship was foundational to this project's success. This initiative was championed by Vice Chancellor Prof. Prasanna Gamage and made possible by the institutional support of the university. A commendation to the engineering team, Janith Chathuranga, Tharindu Dilshan, Umesh Hasaranga, Sanjaya Herath, Mohamed Ilham, Avishka D. Rajapaksha, and Hasan Rila, who delivered under exceptional pressure.
