Who? Developer hero Marcus Noble, Senior software engineer

[Developer Economics] Hello! Tell us about your role and what you do:

[Marcus Noble] Hello! My name is Marcus Noble and I’m a senior software engineer at Elsevier working on their ecommerce platform.

What kind of languages do you work with?

Generally we work with web technologies: HTML, JavaScript and CSS. For a backend we primarily use TypeScript with NodeJS.

How did you get started?

My first experience of programming came when I was roughly 10 years old, using view-source to look at how websites were made and changing them in Notepad to see what happens. I think the first thing I completed was a DragonBall Z fan site.

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How much do you think developers need to focus on specific frameworks or languages these days?

Very little. A solid understanding of programming principles and design patterns are far more valuable and transferable than knowing how to use the latest and greatest framework. I much prefer opting to use small libraries focusing on one feature over a full-blown framework to make it easier in the future to swap out bits of my application.

“Things get dull when you know exactly how to do everything.”

How much are you involved in buying decisions (in terms of technology platforms etc.) at you company?

A little. I can give input and my opinions on services but that decision is ultimately made by those above me.

Do you think that there is a still a separation between developers and other business departments (e.g. marketing etc.)

I think things are getting better but there is still a visible separation with the areas of the business that developers only have a small amount of interaction with. I’ve noticed that areas that have a vested interested in what the developers build seem to be increasingly more engaging with the development teams.

What projects are you working on right now?

I’m currently working on a new project to expand our current e-commerce platform to support business-to-business sales. The majority of the project will be greenfield applications so we’re able to experiment with some of the latest tools and practices to see what works best.

How helpful do you find developer surveys? [e..g. SlashData report – which seeks to help developers to make better business decisions, with salary benchmarks, trends, programming languages, framework choice etc etc]

I think they’re a great way of getting a sense of the wider community outside our immediate echo chamber. I predominately communicate with other JavaScript developers so that’s usually all I hear about. It’s always interesting to be able to be able to hear about the changes happening with Go or Rust or C++.

Do you think developers sometimes undersell themselves?

I’m pretty sure that isn’t limited to just developers. I’m sure we’ve all had moments where we’ve felt completely unable to do a task and thus try and downplay our abilities only to discover later that we could. Technology is such a broad subject area with many deep-reaching topics it’s very easy for us to become overwhelmed by it all and undersell the skills that we do have because of the skills we don’t have.

So where do you go to get tech-related news?

Mostly Twitter. I mainly use it to follow various technologists from around the world to keep up to date. I also receive a few weekly newsletters with the latest JavaScript and DevOps news.

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What’s going up and what’s going down in your industry?

I think the web browser is what’s going up. There’s been so many huge advancements in the past few years. So many incredible applications that once needed huge C/C++ codebases are being ported to run in the browser making them available to many more people on many more devices. With that in mind I think (hoping) unnecessary native mobile applications are going down. Many applications now have web apps with comparable features without the large storage requirements.

What do you think the future looks like in terms of IaaS vs PaaS vs Containers vs Serverless?

Hard to say. We’re currently looking at a mixture between containers and IaaS. Up to now we haven’t had much success with serverless infrastructure as I think the technology is still too young, comfortable monitoring and logging has been a struggle. Once the tooling has caught up I definitely think it has great potential to move a lot of applications away from an IaaS setup.

Are you working on the projects you would like to work on?

For the most part, yes. As long as I’m still learning new things I’m working on the right projects. Things get dull when you know exactly how to do everything.

Do you have a favourite superhero?

Yes, Legion. Why settle for just one super power?

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