Mark Allan

Mark is a software engineer and Microsoft MVP and has learnt his trade from 35 years of mistakes. He’s an expat Mancunian (red half) but has lived in his adopted home of Northern Ireland for nearly half his life.

He’s been a professional developer since the 1980s, mostly freelance, and has worked on a myriad of projects for everything from local startups and councils to multinational corporations and federal government departments. In search of a quieter life, he now works full time for Gearset in their Belfast office.

While something of a technology omnivore, particularly if it’s new and shiny, he currently tends towards React front-ends sitting on top of scalable cloud-first services, using a functional, event-driven and reactive approach. He’s also a big advocate of the DevOps mindset.

In his spare time he’s a STEM Ambassador, CoderDojo mentor, Barefoot volunteer and organiser of the Northern Ireland Developer Conference.

Thinking thunks: adopting React and Redux