Power User Spotlight: Virtusa’s Prasith Tharuka Wins 2023 Unqork Creator Hackathon

Watch Prasith present his winning submission

Meet Prasith

Prasith began his career as a Pega PRPC developer in Sri Lanka, eventually becoming a Pega Certified Senior System Architect. After garnering five years of experience, he moved to the US to work as an onsite Technical Architect. 

In 2019, he attended training on the Unqork platform and began working in the insurance domain creating solutions that digitize forms using OCR tools. “I never thought I would choose Unqork over Pega, because I had 7.5 years with Pega PRPC at that time,” says Prasith. But that’s what he did, and he never looked back. Since then, Prasith has gone on to earn his Intermediate, Associate, and Professional Configurator certificates in Unqork.

What he loves about Unqork

• Easy to learn. Unqork developers never have to learn a new code. All development is visual and intuitive. “It’s very easy to learn and start building with Unqork,” says Prasith.
• A platform that keeps evolving. “Having access to the latest platform features without any additional work is my favorite,” says Prasith. “And the Unqork platform keeps evolving!” 
• Accelerated development. “When I was working in traditional software developments, I remember the struggles I had setting up environments, maintaining them, and especially upgrading the software platforms to newer versions,” says Prasith. “Unqork project implementation takes considerably less time and effort from the developer’s point of view.” 

The power of Dynamic Refresh

Unqork’s Dynamic Refresh feature enables seamless content delivery by refreshing (or loading) parts of an Unqork application without reloading the entire page. This speeds performance and makes changes in content on a page feel more intuitive, helping to keep users engaged. 

In addition, it allows for much greater component reusability. “Apart from dynamically loading physically existing modules, Dynamic Refresh unlocks a new avenue to developers where they can manipulate component definition data and render Unqork components,” explains Prasith. 

His winning 2023 Hackathon submission: Unqork Form-Building Accelerator

Called Zaapy, Prasith’s submission took first prize in the individual contributor category. His app enables non-technical business users to automatically generate high-level Unqork front-end modules. “During the end of discovery phase, this tool can be used to generate simple front-end modules and later share those modules with the configurator team to enhance them with complex business logic,” explains Prasith. “Overall, the tool gives a jump-start to project development and reduces development time.”  

Dynamic Refresh is a key component of Prasith’s solution. “While building forms using the tool, end users can see what their final module is going to look like in an interactive preview window,” explains Prasith. “That preview window loads components using Dynamic Refresh, and changes are instantly previewed in the window, which is a very powerful and fun experience at the same time.”