Joe Noordally · Frontend Developer at TopGear

From HTML tables to Flash to React and JavaScript: A 25 year progression

• Joe Noordally

• New Ash Green, England

• Started writing C in the 90s

• Used coding books for troubleshooting

• Witnessed the rise and fall of Flash

• Now works at TopGear for the BBC

Behind the scenes

I met Joe (LI: @joenoordally) in 2022 while working for a civil engineering company called Mott MacDonald. We formed a great team and worked together really well for about 6 months.

Although he’s been in tech for 25 years now, he was always so enthusiastic about everything we did. I always admired that. Will I be as enthusiastic in 15 years?

So Joe, what's your backstory?

I really liked computers when I was at school. I had a few friends who were into it, but they didn't like it as much. They didn't want to hunt around for a semicolon that was out of place or anything like that. But I wanted to pursue it.

I liked making things work on a computer and seeing what I could make with the UI.

So I did my college course in C. But when we got to the point where it was time to get our qualification and final exam, our tutor left. All they could do was offer us another course, or you know, we could just leave.

So I left and decided it's time to seek my own employment. This was around 1998 or something like that. I started with a couple of horrible jobs and then I landed this nice one in travel technology.

What was the role?

There was a search engine which our company developed that allowed you to search for flights. Companies would buy that as a white label, and our job was to make sure it fitted with their own website. So you'd change the styles, change the HTML just to suit their website. Back then it was all tables and <td /> <tr /> tags.

Think Skyscanner. We were competitors with them. But there was also some integration there. They'd send us data, we'd send them data as well. But I didn't know too much about what they were doing. I was just a lowly developer at the time. Didn't know the ins and outs of the business areas. I was just doing the front end stuff.

But it was the first time that you could go online and actually purchase a flight ticket for yourself.

How did you get the flight data?

Flight data came from an SQL server, which we had no control over. We had the tools to actually interrogate the server, but it was all like, don't touch this, set in stone, leave it alone, just do the front end. And so that's where I got my first taste of website front end development.

What tools did you use back then?

We were using Microsoft FrontPage, the web editing suite. So like Adobe Dreamweaver, but before that. Yeah, so real old-school back-in-the-day stuff.

And there was no mobile. It was all just desktop. And it was all Internet Explorer. So you designed it for Internet Explorer 4, as it were.

Eventually, I felt my time was up. I didn’t see any career progression with this company. So I moved to a marketing company called Strata. They did stuff with BT and Japan Airlines, making marketing emails and websites.

How did you make the jump from one to the other?

I looked at my skill set. I thought, yeah, I can apply this to other areas. And I really like making things look pretty and beautiful. And I wanted it to be as interactive as possible. The user experience was my focus at the time.

Strata had no one else who did website development at the time. They always third-partied it out.

So I started making HTML emails at first and then progressed to making Japan Airlines' first e-newsletter called JAL News. We put that together with a subscription system so we'd get a database of all these people who wanted to sign up.

How did you go about solving problems?

I had a huge HTML book that helped me get through and know what the parameters were for anything. And there was another one, a nice big JavaScript book as well.

These are really thick books. That was my key to survival at the time.

There was no Stack Overflow or ChatGPT back then, and YouTube was in its infancy. So yeah it was all books, old-school style.

Then Flash started taking over. It was becoming the dominant thing. And so I thought, yep, I need to get on board with this.

How did you realize that Flash was taking over?

Flash started with lots of little memes. There were these little animations of cats playing stuff in various musical videos. This was not on YouTube, it was a different site. But I thought that's fun and it's different and it's interactive.

It felt like that's where the web was going. I thought, yeah I need to get hold of this and learn how to do this because it's the only way you can make video appear on the web at the time. There was no video tag and you think, yeah I might as well follow the trend and go for it.

And then, of course, there was the conference called Flash on the Beach, which was held in Brighton every year. So I made a point of going to that.

Why do you think Flash died?

We moved into an era where we wanted to monetize what people were looking at.

And so the experimental features and the things that we would like to interact with and play with had to level out and die off. So that interactivity and monetization could come in and make the big bucks for the big people. With Flash, it was a closed door. You couldn't interrogate or find out what people were looking at.

That, and the open letter coming out from Apple about how the iPhone and the iPad were not going to support Flash.

I was still a PC guy working in a Flash world, and I knew that my world was about to change rapidly.

Why do you think Apple did that?

They could see where Flash was going wrong, I suppose. They could see where Flash had its limitations.

Flash was power-hungry.

It tried to limit itself and tried to keep energy supplies down, but it wasn't. It was a battery hog.

I think that was its death. If Apple had supported it and if they had worked together, perhaps the world would be a different place. But it didn't. And it went down the route of, right, we're going to do WebGL and we're going to start using JavaScript predominantly and JavaScript's going to lead. Which it did. So I had to let that go.

That's when I started going to advertising because Flash was still okay for that. So I put myself up for a Dutch-French company, called Webarama. I started doing online ads, big takeover spectacular ads that used Flash at the time.

So you remained a Flash developer?

For now, but at the same time, I started to get myself back into JavaScript.

HTML5 was the big shiny new thing and so I needed to find out what it’s all about. Is it just Mac boys liking it or is it for everyone? And so I decided to get myself into HTML and JavaScript that way.

Stack Overflow was available by then. So that's how I started learning it. I was looking for how you take what you got in Flash and turn it into something more HTML5 and JavaScript based. From that point, I then self-taught myself from Flash to JavaScript and used CSS.

How did you move to more modern technologies like React?

Fast forward 10-15 years, to COVID and the lockdown, I was put on furlough with 80% pay. So I used an account I had with Udemy and learned advanced HTML using git control, CI, CD, and React. So for a year or so, I plugged myself into React.

That was when I decided it was time to get out of the ad world and embrace the rest of the web. So after React, I picked up Vue and also picked up Node at the same time. And I thought this is great. I like this stuff. I can see myself moving forward here. I will apply and see what I can do outside of the ad world. And that's how I got the interview with who I'm working with now.

What's your day to day now on TopGear?

So on TopGear, we have our usual daily stand-up with a two-week sprint. We have a technical dev catch-up three times a week, where we catch up with our dev team.

When a new feature comes in, I’ll first find it in Figma, where the UX guy talks me through it and how it’s supposed to look. Then I do the development work, and when it gets signed off with the UX, I display it to the rest of the team. It then goes into a PR (pull request).

Once it passes PR, our QA guys will then tear it apart as they usually do. Why is this here? Why is it not working like that? But once they're happy, they'll then push it into “Ready to Deploy“. Once deployed it will go through a smoke test with QA and that’s it.

What’s the tech stack?

It's a Next.js app with lots of other layers. There is a search service and a CMS service, now a user profile service, and all are built into one big sort of Dockerized container. And we use styled-system for styling, modified heavily now for the BBC.

What advice would you give to a junior developer?

I'd say start with yourself. What do you love about software development? What is your massive drive?

Do you want to see pixels move around? Do you want to see animations happen on your screen? Do you want to have a really, really good database that has a good linkage of tables?

Ask those questions to yourself and answer them honestly, and if you do that you'll probably find which way you want to go in your software career.

And I'd say try a bit of everything. Then if you find yourself led by a particular stack, whether it's the front end, full stack, or you particularly like the back end sort of structure, go for it and try and learn as much as you can.

Do you think a degree is necessary?

That's a hard question because I didn't do one. And I learned, but I was old school and learned when everything was still kicking off. I would say a degree is helpful in some regard. It depends on your learning curve and how you learn.

Where do you see yourself in the future?

As long as I'm learning something new and not redoing everything all the time, then I'm probably in a good place and seeing my career progress.

If I'm feeling like I'm stagnating, like before COVID, then that's where I don't want to be anymore. And I will know that now, and I’ll move on when I start feeling that itch to learn something new.

If you had to change jobs tomorrow, how would you go about it?

If I had to change tomorrow, I would start looking at my LinkedIn page, making sure that was up to date, and work on my CV.

And then I would start hitting all those people that want to get you jobs all the time, that are always on your back, all those prospective recruiters that are always asking you whether you're available. And make them work for me because they know what they're doing and I can always say yes or no to them. I think they'll help me the best.

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That’s a wrap!
If you have any questions for Joe, reply in the comments below.

See you next time ❤️

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