Meet the team – introducing Ruwan
If you’re the primary contact listed for your organisation’s website it’s likely you’ve heard from Ruwan. He plays a lead role in maintaining the GovCMS Drupal distributions. Ruwan and his team aim to release and deploy updates to the Drupal 8 (D8) distribution fortnightly.
‘Drupal is a fast-moving environment with rapid releases of updates to modules. These updates are incorporated into our releases. Regular updates to the distribution help maintain security, enhance capability and minimise potential issues,’ said Ruwan.
You may have noticed in recent D8 release notes modules are updated with D9 compatible versions.
‘So far we are working on 95 per cent of the D8 modules in the GovCMS D8 distribution to make them D9 compatible. We’re working towards achieving compatibility for most modules in the distribution. This will reduce the impact of moving from D8 to D9. We’re also working to identify a parity of function between D7 and D9 modules. This will help customers to rebuild their websites.’
Ruwan worked with the Online Services Branch before the inception of GovCMS. During his time in the team he has seen lots of changes. The introduction of Drupal 9 is one of the biggest changes so far.
Ruwan graduated from ANU as a software engineer over 20 years ago. He has been in the website developer space ever since.
Outside of work, Ruwan likes walks, badminton and playing dolls with his nine year old daughter.
Ruwan moved from Sri Lanka to Australia in 1987. He likes to maintain his cultural heritage speaking Sinhalese at home.
‘My daughter is also learning Chinese, so she’ll be one up on me! It will also come in handy for when we’re able to travel again.’