A. Software Development Career
1. What has been the biggest change you’ve witnessed in the world of software development for educational assessment products?
10 years ago, I remember the excitement around the potential of cloud-based software for the educational market; in terms of what could be accomplished by teachers going online and students taking charge of their own learning.
Khan Academy was popular at the time, along with the famous MOOCs Coursera and EdX. This was a shift from the established Learning Management Systems - Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle etc., in that there was no setup involved, no administrator needed, and one had to just sign on and get started.
For the K-12 market specifically, the conversations were around keeping students engaged while working online. That, and gamification were the highlights of several new platforms that sprung up (Kahoot, ClassDojo etc). It was also the time when HTML5 became the standard for the world wide web, and older technologies like Java Applets and Adobe Flash began to be phased out.
2. The education sector faces unique challenges in user adoption of new technology.
How have you approached designing and implementing software that is user-friendly for both educators and students?
This is a good point - teachers would like to focus on teaching and do not want to spend significant time learning how to use a product. Students are less particular, but they too need to be able to focus on class or school work rather than on the technology used.
The best approach would be to keep things as simple as possible. Put yourself in the shoes of the user. One helpful thing about designing software for education is that every one of us has been a student; so it should be easier to think of what a student or teacher would be looking for in a given application, and the common bottlenecks they would encounter.
I would suggest resisting the temptation to add more and more features and functionality to a single program or page. Let the code or UI do just a few things - but what it does and doesn’t do, should be clearly articulated, both to the user and to the team.
3. Data security and student privacy are paramount in educational technology. How has your development process evolved to ensure the highest standards of data protection?
In recent years, there are increasing regulations surrounding the protection of student data that software vendors are required to comply with. Framing a comprehensive company policy is the first of several ongoing steps. We have also started with implementing some preliminary measures like regulating access to the data, avoiding downloading of student information, and data deletion and anonymization when data is not required to be identifiable.
4. The rise of AI raises questions about the future of jobs in software development. In your experience, what skills or areas of expertise will be most crucial for software engineers to thrive in a world increasingly influenced by AI?
I’m afraid I don’t have much experience working with AI, but what I’ve read about it and heard from others using it is this: to be able to extract working solutions from AI, one has to break the problem into very specific instructions and go through a few iterations of tweaking the prompts before getting a reasonable result. It’s interesting to note that you need to first be able to think of what your code should do, before you can expect the AI tool to figure it out for you.
Another useful bit of information is that coding-specific LLMs are supposedly easier to work with than general purpose ones like ChatGPT.
B. Work Life Balance
5. Balancing a demanding career in IT with personal life can be challenging. What strategies have you found helpful in achieving work-life balance?
This is something that needs to be consciously worked on! The nature of software work is such that one can’t always predict how long it will take to get something done. With hybrid work, it is difficult to set strict boundaries between work and personal time. A few strategies that I would vouch for are
a) Build a daily personal routine and stick to it. This makes you more efficient at doing certain repetitive tasks everyday and you free up your time to do the more demanding ones.
b) If possible, plan your most important work around the time of the day when you’re most alert.This doesn’t have to be a long stretch, even an hour or two of uninterrupted time is good enough to dedicate to focused work.
C. Personal
6. Outside of your professional life, what are some hobbies or interests that you are passionate about?
I do like to read, though it’s been difficult for me to read as frequently as I would like to. If nothing, I at least try to read the day’s newspapers! I also have an interest in music, and had enrolled in weekend lessons a few years ago.
7. Looking back on your career, what accomplishment are you most proud of, and why?
When I reflect on the projects I have completed, what strikes me is that almost all of them had one thing in common: they had data in some kind of unstructured form (by design or by chance) and my main goal was to devise some pattern or rule that would suit the data, and then build a program that would parse and use that data. One example was to merge two item types into a single item type that could perform the functions of both. It was not always straightforward, and there were many occasions when I felt I had come a long way but completion would be very hard, if not impossible. However, deciding to persevere has always worked. What I eventually achieved was not perfect; but it was the best that I could do at the time. Let perfect not be the enemy of good, is an approach that I have grown to appreciate most of all, over the years!