Tell us a little more about yourself
I’m Shahrukh. I’m originally from Pakistan but my family moved to Belfast on New Years Eve, 2006. I moved to London for university and didn’t think I’d come back, but after four years of doing Aeronautical Engineering at Imperial College London (and having zero interest in it), I decided to move back to Belfast for a breather. After a summer of working on improving my skills in software development, I ended up at B-Secur.
I didn’t think I’d get the job as I didn’t have a computer science background, so I applied for a Master’s in Software Development at Queen’s while I was waiting for B-Secur to get back to me. I was two weeks into the master’s when I got the job at B-Secur so I decided to do both. By the grace of God and a fair bit of work it worked out quite well.
Can you share insight into what a typical day at B-Secur involves for you?
A typical day involves working on issues for our frontend (android, iOS and web) and backend apps. These issues could range from fixing bugs in existing applications, to developing new features, to changing the architecture of an existing application to bring it up to date with best practices, or to create new applications.
I fill the time in between with learning and researching about new tools and technologies in software development and cloud computing. The more you know about various tools and technologies, the more informed decisions you can make about their use in development.
The app market is expected to reach $700 billion by the end of 2021. What do you expect to see from the market and how will it impact the future of B-Secur’s Android, iOS and Cloud development?
On one hand the tools and technologies to make software are becoming more democratised, but on the other the laws around data sharing and privacy are becoming stricter as individuals and companies become conscious of their data sharing practices.
It’s not enough to know how to develop good software but you must ensure that your customers feel confident in using the products, whether it is frontend software like apps for iOS, android and web or backend servers that process and store the data from the apps.
Since you joined B-Secur we have gone through a few iterations, can you share your perspective on the changes our technology has gone through and what you have excelled/found challenging?
When I first started, everything was new to me: Flutter, Dart, Springboot and Server Side Programming. The technologies (Flutter and Dart) were also relatively new and at times the whole thing just felt too experimental. With the passage of time, both the technologies and my skills and knowledge have grown, so now I’m a lot more comfortable working and experimenting with new technologies and tools.
What has been your most rewarding experience with B-Secur to date?
At B-Secur we’ve built a cloud and apps ecosystem around our embedded library to help our customers quickly evaluate the technology and accelerate their own development. I think working with this has been the most rewarding experience, as I got to work and build them from the ground up alongside my team.
Working on individual issues can give you a false sense of competence, it’s only when you are faced with making choices about the design of an entire system is when your wits and skills are really tested.
Another such project was during my MSc in Software Development. I built a social media platform to connect investors with entrepreneurs. It gave me the opportunity to use all the skills I had learnt through my job, masters and personal learning to create a fully functioning platform (frontend and backend) from scratch.
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Watch this interview with Muhammad Shahrukh recorded earlier this year by Bring I.T. on.