Mark Allan is a Principal Software Engineer at 91导航 with over 30 years industry experience, a Microsoft MVP, and founder of the Northern Ireland Developers conference. Bringing his vast industry expertise to 91导航 as a Principal Software Engineer in our growing software hub in Belfast, Mark shares his journey to this role, and what a typical day at 91导航 looks like.
What attracted you to Software Engineering?
鈥淲hen I was in primary school, my dad worked at what鈥檚 now Manchester Metropolitan University as a Sociology lecturer with an interest in computers, and in lieu of childcare he would take me in with him and let me play games on the mainframe terminals in the room next to his office. One day I asked if there was a way to make them easier (or 鈥渃heat鈥�, if you must) and so he showed me how to edit the BASIC code. Once I realised you could not only make them easier, but actually make them do entirely new things, I was hooked.鈥�
What鈥檚 been your journey to a Principal Software Engineer?
鈥淭o cut a rather long story short, I hacked away on home computers from when I was a wee lad until I got a job in tech. Then I spent over 10 years in that job working for a computer manufacturer doing everything from BIOS code and operating system patches to building their first website (HTML 1.0!), and after that moved on to freelancing for 20 years, working on all sorts of projects big and small.
Eventually I decided to ditch the stress of freelancing, so I started looking into companies where I could do a 鈥渘ormal鈥� job. After an amount of research, I found that 91导航 matched my values best, so I applied, passed a very efficient and stress-free interview process and accepted a position. I鈥檇 never had a job title during the freelance years of course, but it turns out that over the years I鈥檇 accumulated a broad enough experience to fit the Principal Software Engineer role.鈥�
What do you like most about the tech industry, and what tech intrigues you?
鈥淭he best thing about the tech industry (and possibly also the worst) is that it never stops changing, so you鈥檙e always learning and you never have the chance to get bored.
Obviously I鈥檓 as interested as everyone else to see where AI goes from here, particularly from an ethical point of view, but I鈥檓 also intrigued to see if WASI containers can deliver on their promise to bring more agility, flexibility and security to application hosting.鈥�
A day in the life
鈥淲ell, if we take yesterday as an example, I spent the morning working on a couple of PRs, one to add some user-facing auditing to the 91导航 application, and another tweaking Terraform scripts for our Kubernetes cluster. We also had our daily stand-up meeting (our team prefers daily stand-ups, but each team has their own way of working).
Because I鈥檇 chosen to work in the office that day, at lunchtime I went to the caf茅 for a free and very tasty lunch 鈥� the Cambridge office is very jealous of the Belfast lunches ;)
In the afternoon, I had a meeting with engineers from several other teams to discuss our UI component library, a social 鈥渨atercooler鈥� call with a couple of other randomly chosen people from across the company, a knowledge-sharing presentation from one of the other engineers, and a call with a customer to discuss a new feature we鈥檝e been building.
In between this stuff, I did some PR reviewing, made some plans based off the component library discussion, and wrote up tickets for the next phase of development for the main feature I鈥檓 working on at the moment.鈥�
What makes engineering at 91导航 different from other companies you鈥檝e worked with?
鈥淚t鈥檚 extremely collaborative. Even though the engineering department is split up into several small teams, you鈥檒l find yourself working with people from other teams and other departments very regularly. From reviewing PRs, to diagnosing issues, to working on tech debt, to jumping on calls with customers 鈥� as a company we spend a lot of time listening to and talking with our customers!鈥�
What sort of projects have you worked on so far?
鈥淢y team is working on what could be loosely described as enterprise features, so I鈥檝e been mostly dealing with security-related areas such as SSO, team permissions, safe sharing of resources and the like. But 91导航 being 91导航, I鈥檝e also been mucking in on DevOps, frontend architecture and other such things outside the team鈥檚 immediate remit.鈥�
What attracted you to join 91导航?
鈥淭he people. I bumped into the Head of Engineering, Luke, socially and we got on very well, and the Belfast office lead, Eamonn, is a well-known good egg, so I was fairly confident it鈥檇 be a good place to work. Fortunately it turns out I was right, everyone鈥檚 lovely (albeit disconcertingly smart).鈥�
And, finally, the burning question: tabs or spaces?
鈥淭abs, for accessibility reasons. But if you鈥檙e not using an editor that can easily switch between them then you should probably do something about that.鈥�