Singapore is a diverse country with lots of races lives in harmony. Frankly I haven't seen this kind of mixture in any country of the world i have been yet. Its quite amazing how the founding father of Singapore have made a good foundation for racial harmony in Singapore. Because Singapore is nothing without people. The name of this tiny red dot known to the world because of the work done by Singapore people - with zero natural resources (They even don't have drinking water hence piped from Malaysia) :O IMO Singapore is a miracle work of a very patriotic political leader they had. Namely. Mr. Lee quan yew. Weldone sir! 

Culture is really Parra cultural here (dunno where i got that word parra culture :P) Means this is diverse. 70% of the entire population makes of Chinese people. 20% Malay (the natives actually Malay, long story short. Singapore was kind of state of Malaysia 50 years before) 10% indians (mostly south indians), 3% Others. Including Sri Lankans and people from numerous other South east asian countries and europeans as well (Don't know exactly why those ppl are here, probably for girls ;D).

So with this kind of huge mixture its very difficult to communicate with people sometimes. Luckily the official language is English. Noh la! :D its called Singlish. Singlish meaning Singapore English. Its a mixture of English with Chinese Mandarine, Bahasa Melayu and Tamil languages. (Obviously the langs of major races live here.) So in day-today life you are not experiencing the general english you hear like in western world. Its quite different, I had hard time grabbing it early days here and i think i am used to it now. :)

Singapore is just small as 1/100 of Sri Lanka, but it makes the home to 1/20 of total Sri Lankan population. Hence the density of people is very very high. (Chances of getting sick also very high thus high crowd on public places - i actually got sick 2 times in these 7months. :( quite difficult to survive these viruses. They have annual flu jab excersise  to overcome this quite a bit.

Singapore is one of the safest, cleanest, more planned (well structured) country. Also with amazing transportation system connecting everywhere of the city. Sometimes i still wonder how they have built the downtown lines. The trains travels underground, so far away from the surface. We have to use like 2, 3 escalators down to reach the train stage. :O Miracle work by Engineers. Just within few years. (Singapore is just old as 51 years, so all these miracle work have been done within 50 years. I wonder how much will that take to build the same train underground in Sri Lanka, probably 10 years :D)



Being said that Singapore is also one of the countries with citizens gets least sleep in world (around 6 hours of sleep!? dafaq.) yeap The majority of Singaporeans works so hard to make a living, its a quite expensive to live, Unlike in Sri Lanka medical expenses are sky high, So the poor people and middle class have to work hard for everything. (Singapore dont have beggars, gov provide them with tissue packets to sell in public places hawker centers -- public canteens in SEA region.)

Talking about work culture, they simple work so hard, very punctual. Most of the Singaporeans companies starts work at 8.30 AM and ends at 5.30PM. Around 6 PM you will not able to see a single employee in office, Done and gone! 

Getting a job in Singapore is not difficult as you might think, its just a matter of time. I haven't heard my friends who bears (skill, degree, experience) gone back without finding a job here. Being said that if you are not coming on the right time (preferably right after Chinese new year) it will be quite time consuming to find a job since the flow is slow. Here are some awesome info sources for the job seekers (in Sinhala)

• http://www.elakiri.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1721107
• http://www.elakiri.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1721595
• http://www.elakiri.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1720979

I think i had great experience working in my first overseas job. My company, i worked here is known as, Educare cooperative Ltd (a company behind Singapore teachers union.) a truly Singaporean company so i had experienced Singaporean culture. (There are many MNCs here in Singapore where can experience different working culture.) I have worked on android chat app similar to whatsapp in Educare where i have worked on both app and backend server myself. (kind of fullstack development job.) Where i developed the app from scratch. 

Quality of life in Singapore is very nice. Transportation, Food, everything perfectly standardized. Wish Sri Lanka also have such a perfect government, Once i went to one of the Police stations of Singapore and it looked like a hotel. Totally cool. Getting a Crime clearance report in Singapore takes jz 1 day since its all centralized, computerized system. Almost everything is computerized here. From busses to trains to taxis. You have apps to track realtime. Kind of dreamland right! Yup. thats how its already. You might want to check the data they have exposed to 3rd party developers here: https://data.gov.sg . quite impressive. that even hv the information of GYM availability and crowdedness information! voila.

Despite the development of Singapore i have seen some cons as well. First one can be a LOL one. People are so workaholic IMO. May be they are working so hard to take the country forward. Singapore is so small (the size of Colombo district in all) hence majority of ppl are stuck in sooo small Apartment "homes". These kind of Apartments have several rooms, bathrooms, kitchen, living room. Quite comfortable in Condos. But still stuck to a very limited environment. And private vehicle prices are so high to restrict the usage of road network of this busy country. (my 1997 Lancer CK2AMX is priced around 2 times Sri Lankan price here) Also the Medical expenses are sky high! We are really lucky in Sri Lanka have free education, free health for everyone! In this part of the world if you dont have money, cannot work hard - you have to suffer a lot. :( Gov has some limited funding resources for the poor people to take care of.

There are some amazing/must visit attractions in Singapore: Senthosa island, Marina Bay financial area, botanical garden, Zoo, etc. But being a hobbyist explorer one of the drawbacks for me was becz the country is so small - there's also nothing much to see or go for picnics. Luckily Singapore have a cool Airport (One of the world's best airports! totally amazing Airport called Changi) which makes the aviation hub to South east asia. So there are many countries to visit from Singapore at a very low price. Malaysia of course the nearest, a diverse and a country with so many areas to see/so many things to do, and Indonesia also same, located in south of Sg. Thailand, Cambodia, Hongkong, Mianmar, Vietnam, Philippines, Australia are couple of other destinations which can discover at a very low price.

Being Sri Lankans; Food is gonna be a huge problem for us in Singapore. Since the majority who live here are Chinese most of the Restaurants serve Chinese food which is very uneatable for us. (I hate the smell even LOL) Unless you cook in your own apartment kitchens food is gonna be a huge problem. And for our luck Singapore makes the population to 10% of south indians. Since the south indian food is very similar, we can have them very easily, delicious too. There's also few Sri Lankan restaurants inside Singapore but reaching those places everyday gonna be a pain if you live outside of central area (Little india district). So somehow people tend to get used to Malay food at-least. which is kind of middle of both worlds. (Chinese world food and Sri Lankan food) Malay food are being served at almost everywhere, so getting used to Malay food will make the life easier.

The experience i gained here was quite amazing, its actually consist with life long lessons and experiences i guess. Totally worth it! I wanna thank few of my friends who helped me in hard times to make this happen. Shamika, Sandun, Lali, Dewmal, Tharindu - these guys helped me financially in the beginning (until i find the job i needed several of lacks to live in this highly expensive city.) without these guys i will be done xD) And later in Singapore i met 2 wonderful brothers who guided me on everything there after - Amila ayya and Sajith ayya. I highly respect these brothers for the guidance and mentorship given to me in this period at Singapore. 

Sooo thats it. Hope i have covered the major parts of the story.  

It has been a wonderful journey, Thank you for everything Singapura!

And yes, OpenMRS world summit 2015 is the latest & i am really glad i have participated for it.

Despite of my physical illness which i got infected in the last 2 days, I really enjoyed the every bit of it.

Event was very well organized by the OpenMRS staff. Singapore management university was a really good venue. So much easy access to the venue with convenient transportation by MRT which is also quite cheap. I really don't want to mention much about the food because i don't like Chinese like food much which are very popular in SG, but there's a city called 'little india' for south asians like us to consume much tastier food similar to the ones we have in home countries. :) Singapore is a very nice country consist with very interesting places to visit. Marina bay sands was one of my favorite places in SG. And cannot forget other cool places such as gardens by the bay & Senthosa island.

Sessions on the summit was great.

• Cloud Computing for OpenMRS Data Analysis
• Project Buendia: In-Depth
• Project Bahmini & how indian folks tries to solve the healthIT related problems in india.

In lightning talks event, I have a done a brief speech to the participants on "OpenMRS iOS Client" From the responses i got i think quite a lot of people liked the project and the idea. 

 

The OpenMRS worldwide summit 2015 was a great experience and i really appreciate OpenMRS LLC for sponsoring me with a travel grant. It really was a invaluable experience to gain knowledge on healthcare informatics.

Mentioning about my future plans with OpenMRS project, I always wanted to contribute OpenMRS whenever i can. These days i'm quite busy with my masters thesis and my day job as usual. I hope i could do more things and contribute OpenMRS in the months to come. So this is not the end of my engagement with this wonderful open source project and hopefully it should be a life long journey!

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