Unhandled Exceptions: Refresh Colombo

Refresh Colombo

Collaboration and team work are two concepts that go a long way towards building up innovation. Working within a like minded community often spurs innovation with the collective knowledge of the community being used to generate ideas and to push past challenges and obstacles.

In many other parts of the world meetups are organized constantly and in particular, tech meetups are held for tech interested individuals to come and share their discoveries, ideas and current projects they may be working on.

It’s been a long time coming but Sri Lanka finally (as of 1 year ago) has its own tech meetup, Refresh Colombo. The organizers, who describe Refresh Colombo as a tech meetup for anyone interested in tech, even your grandmother, join me on set to kick off the very first unhandled exceptions video.

Why Refresh Colombo?

When deciding who to pick for the very first Unhandled Exceptions show there was some difficulty because even though I had so many individuals on the list of interviewees I didn’t want to interview anyone from a single vertical. What I wanted was some kind of initiative that embodied the concept of innovation as a whole. Even though Refresh Colombo is rooted in technology, technology itself is far too broad a concept to be called a vertical and so the decision was made.

Refresh Colombo in a nutshell.

·        Refresh Colombo is held every fourth Thursday of the month at the Royal College Skills Centre at 5:30 PM.

·        The mission is to create a platform to bridge the gap between the technology creators, the users and most importantly, the potential investors.

·        The talks range from tech topics to tech entrepreneurship to being successful at business.

·        One of their goals that they have in mind is to create a pool of speakers.

·        The organization of this is done completely by just a few individuals with money being brought in through sponsorships. This is a not for profit venture.

·        You can help by assisting to find sponsors or by being a sponsor yourself. Sponsors of this effort are essentially certifying themselves to be supporters of innovation and progress.

Contact information

·        You can find more information by checking the website here.

·        Facebook page

·        Twitter accounts –

o  Refresh Colombo - @RefreshColombo

o  Milad Mubarak - @Milad_Mubarak

o  Hamid Afzal - @HamidAfzal

o  Aloka Gunasekara - @AlokaG

If you are unable to make it to the meetings, Refresh Colombo hosts a live stream (which will be embedded in a post on this website in the future). If live streaming is not an option due to bandwidth limitations or you want to keep up with just the highlights of what is happening then you’ll want to take a look at the live blog which I handle right from the event itself.

Unhandled Exceptions is an umbrella project of Tech Rumble and is an effort to give exposure to people trying out new things or doing things differently in Sri Lanka. To find out more about the show you can check out the very first ‘teaser’ video here.