This month our spotlight goes to @Manu_Ashok! 👏🏽👏🏽
Manu joined the Visa Developer Community back in October 2018 and has gone from being a Newbie to Helper rank - she's worked extensively with Visa Offers Platform APIs and is working on some great projects. You may recognize her as she's been an active contributor in our community, most recently she shared her story with us as a Woman in Tech. Learn why we're proud to give Manu the spotlight in her Q&A below.
Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself, where are you from and what are you currently working on?
[Manu]: My name is Manu Ashok, I am from India and work as a Technical Solution Consultant at Loyalty Prime. We provide loyalty platforms that helps our clients to fulfill their loyalty program strategies. As part of my role, I gather and solution the business requirements of our clients and prospects within our product portfolio. This makes them optimally use our platform for various business use cases.
Q: What interested you in the Visa Developer Center?
[Manu]: We were working on Card Linked offers with one of our customers. Through this project I came to know about the Visa Offers Platform. All the questions and queries I had around this project took me to the Visa Developer Center where I found these awesome Sandboxes (API Playground) to play around with. Things became much smoother when I connected to the community network which is very prompt in helping.
Q: If you were an API, what would you be? Why? J
[Manu]: I would definitely be the VOP Offers API. It gives tremendous opportunity to partners to reward their end customers and keep them engaged to the loyalty program. Especially the CreateOffer webservice, it is like Visa running a rules engine for you.
The click to activate (save OfferActivation) gets more exciting as the end customer needs to activate an offer for herself/himself, which means, they take a conscious action.
Overall, imagine the kind of scenarios one can cater to with this API, it empowers the Partners and hence I choose to be this API 😊.
Q: What do you love most about coding?
[Manu]: Although I do not do much coding now due to demands of my role. But I really get excited when I use these friendlier tools like swagger, postman to create requests and test APIs. I love the way the whole coding mechanism keeps evolving, making it easier and friendlier. I am currently learning and figuring out my ways through tools that can help query noSQL databases. And I find that so interesting and nostalgia from the old relational database SQL query days. 😊
Q: What was the first thing you built with code?
[Manu]: “Hello World”, way back in school. And I am sure a lot of us might have done it 😊.
Q: What’s the most exciting thing about being a developer in the payments industry for you?
[Manu]: The Payment Card tokenization, creating card wallets, data, receiving filtered transactions only from merchant networks. The whole possibility around the card linked offers in Payment Industry is fascinating. Although the compliance stuff and PCI gets a bit overwhelming at times.
Q: Any tips for developers exploring payments?
[Manu]: Take short and sweet steps when you are in exploration stages, I can understand it gets mind boggling at times. Two best tools to use is The Visa Developer Community Network. Feel free to post all your queries, you never know, people might have already solved this issue you are stuck with. The second one is the Project/Playground that gives you a lot of options to play around with.
Q: What has it been like working with Visa Developer so far? What have you learned?
[Manu]: I love the vivid detailed documentation that Visa Developer provides. The list of APIs and what can be achieved through them is helpful. The developer tools are awesome. Being able to create a Project on the tools really helps.
Q: Anything else you want to share about yourself?
[Manu]: Being a women in the tech industry gets challenging at times. Along with managing the client expectations who span across various geographies and needs support at odd hours, I also manage my house and my little one along with my husband. But at the end of it, every small achievement that you get out of a challenging day is so satisfying.
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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!
