This month, our spotlight goes to @MikeyB who is currently bringing offline payment solutions to the aviation retail industry. Learn about his current venture and give him some love with a kudo below!
Q: Tell us a little bit about who you are, where are you from and what are you currently working on?
Originally from St Albans, Hertfordshire, England but have traveled the globe working for the past er… ‘many’ years. My background is in electronic engineering but over time that has morphed through telecoms, into digital systems and finally software. I spent 8 years involved in developing 3G networks, some of my work is just coming to life now, the lead times and integration testing has taken over 10 yrs to complete - and still we haven’t seen the seamless hand-off of mobile voice calls to WiFi voice. My current venture, flightPOS, is bringing offline payment solutions to the aviation retail industry. If you ever fly and need to pay for WiFi based content when there is no internet option and no seat back screens there’s a good chance it will be my software powering the payments
Q: What interested you in Visa Developer?
Visa developer provides the opportunity to have access to a community of experts just when started to need a few questions answered as I finalize my product, due to launch in the coming weeks.
Q: If you were an API, what would you be? Why? 🙂
I think would be an API accessing F1 data. I’d love to analyse the telemetry data coming back from Vettel and Hamilton. I might even POST some brake behavior adjustments so Vettel goes off track at a chicane just in front of Hamilton.
Q: What do you love most about coding?
- The relentless way code evolves, I remember the first mention of Java I came across over 20 years ago, look at it now. Really grown up and there’s still life in the old dog!
- The magic when it all comes together. The bugs testers find that make you go “What?!?! Really?? How could I be so stupid!”
- The tools that try to make coding so simple
- Stackoverflow of course
Q: What was the first thing you built with code?
My goodness…..Zilog Z80 8 bit processor, 4 bit bus, I wrote some assembly language maths ‘thing’, can’t quite recall exactly what but it was not easy. We had to work hard to do simple things back then. Kids of today don’t know they’re born!
Q: What’s the most exciting thing about being a developer in the payments industry for you?
Coming down the track is PCI4.0 and PSD2 SCA. Both of these I expect to make changes to the way I work. PCI 3 has had its day, still stuck in the server room and not really up to it for many of today’s cloud based systems. I expect the changes to cause a world of pain for me initially as requirements that are currently classed as not applicable will be adjusted for today's environments and will become very applicable ☹ Trying to use Atlassian Jira with Confluence as a tool to manage compliance is also exciting – I’ve put in so many hours setting it up that I am determined it will be the best way to work.
Q: Any tips for developers exploring payments?
Yes – when creating validation for cardholder data input screens watch out for iOS having FIVE types of apostrophe to catch. Names like O’Connor might get rejected in error. Caused me no end of grief.
Q: What has it been like working with Visa Developer so far? What have you learned?
I would say responsive. Very responsive. It’s good to know that you are not just firing questions off into a black hole.
Q: Anything else to add?
Don’t stop learning, it keeps you young and also make time away from the keyboard to have a real life interacting with real humans 😊
Every month we will feature Visa Dev Community members who are active on our forums and blogs. Want to be featured? Start by giving this blog a kudo or comment. The more you are active, the better your chances of being the next user of the month!
