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Interview with Shannon Sands



Front-End Developer at Swissport



Shannon's linkedin profile

It’s Sunday afternoon, and Shannon should be enjoying time with his family but has instead rushed them back from an outing so he can jump on a video call with Sam and me for this interview. As diligent students, we had been on the call for 20 minutes before the allotted start time, talking through some last-minute refinement of our questions, eager to be ready when Shannon dialled in. We jump to attention when right-on-time we see the familiar “Shannon Sands waiting in lobby” message pop onto the screen and dutifully click the admit button ready to start the conversation, but alas, nothing happens. For the next 10 minutes, what ensues is an all too familiar frantic plethora of messages back and forth, until finally, following a last-minute computer swap, Shannon appears on our screen, looking every bit the calm consummate IT professional that he is. We joke about how good technology is when it works while I try to find the record button.


This feels like a comfortable place for Shannon, solving problems on the fly, and looking at his resume, I can see why. Shannon has over 10 years of experience working in the IT industry, starting out in Customer Service and IT help desk roles then graduating to Developer roles after completing his Bachelor of Information (Computing Studies), Software Engineering with RMIT in 2016.


For the past year, Shannon has been in the role of Senior Front-End Developer and team leader with Swissport, based in Brisbane. If the name Swissport rings a bell for you, it could be that you’ve seen it in an airport. Swissport operates in 315 airports in 50 countries around the world, employing 68,000 team members to provide ground services and cargo handling for the aviation industry.


We start by asking how IT works in the aviation industry and how much IT is involved in the business. Shannon nods knowingly as he tells us IT is heavily involved these days and incredibly complex with all the baggage and infrastructure that needs to be tracked. Fun fact in 2020, Swissport handled 4.1 million tons of cargo (Swissport 2021), that’s the equivalent of 205 million 20kg suitcases. On top of all that cargo is the scheduling and staff requirements; Shannon tells us that at any given time, they have 10’s of thousands of frontline workers tending to tasks in airports and keeping all that coordinated is a pretty big challenge.


I recently had the opportunity to tour the Virgin Australia head office in Brisbane and was stunned by the level of to-the-minute detail their services were scheduled to. Reflecting on this as I listened, I asked Shannon what the impact of baggage handlers being late to a plane would be. My question is met with a polite but almost dismissive hmm, that I immediately understood as that would never happen! Shannon then gave us our first glimpse of the IT complexity involved “even little things you wouldn’t even think of, like stocking the liquor cabinets. We’ve got a whole system just to make sure the drinks are there on time because a plane can’t leave unless there is coke in the refrigerator! The whole thing is a really detailed exercise in logistics and coordination.”


Eager to learn more about how this happens, Sam asks Shannon what his role as a Front-End developer involves. Shannon shares that while his title is Front-End Developer, his job is more of a Full-Stack developer. I took a note to research what the difference was later and have since learned:

When doing Front-End work, Shannon is using Angular, an open-source development software, telling us “it’s still extremely popular in enterprise because it’s really tightly integrated with Microsoft.net Core…because of that, a lot of enterprises trust it and rely on it pretty heavily”.


It becomes evident during the discussion that a big part of the Front-End role Shannon has is the interpretation of work. When a stakeholder proposes a seemingly innocent project to “Make a form”, Shannon then has to do a detailed interrogation to find all the necessary information to build the form. Details like fonts, button location and what happens to the data once the user has entered it into the form are all vital to the success of the project. Shannon says, “interpreting the business requirements and ensuring we have the correct solution” is the most challenging part of his role.


Graphic design is another key element for the Front-End developer. Shannon shares that they have a particularly talented Front-End specialist who excels at making things look good. “There is all sorts of little details you wouldn’t think of, the subtle animations as you change pages, so it’s not all clunky or even how you actually lay out the design of the page, so it draws people’s attention”.


There is a strong focus for Front-End developers on the User Experience (UX) “Because there is always people that say “I can’t find the button”, so we say it’s the giant red button flashing in the middle of the page”.


We move on to talking about the Back-End development and learn that most applications are CRUD apps – designed to Create, Read, Update or Delete data. Shannon says for a Back-End Developer, the devil is in the detail though, “every single organisation has a lot of differing business rules, with a lot of different automation that happens along the way… This person has filled out the form on the Front-End; now what happens? Do we just save it to the database, do we send an email notification to a salesperson, do we schedule that salespersons calendar to go and contact the person. There is all sorts of little bits of complexity that come between the Front-End and the database.”


The technology Swissport are using is primarily Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microservices. The Microservices work like a chain of Lego blocks that allow them to build the overall system without a single point of failure. The magic for a Back-End developer is understanding how all the services and infrastructure communicate and maintaining the network. As I start to ponder the sheer volume of devices and services they would have to look after, Shannon gives us an example, “The busses that take you out to the plane at the airport each have an iPad; there are thousands of them, they control the schedule for the bus and the announcements made on the bus – each of the devices need to have regular updates pushed to them.”


Shannon explains how each plane also has a sensor that provides different information; combined with all the other sensors and devices, he concludes there may be 100’s of 1000’s of sensors and devices contributing data to the system. I marvel at what it takes to get a plane in the air, and Shannon reiterates the importance of making it all come together. “It has to be carefully coordinated; you don’t want to cause a traffic jam and have a situation where people can’t fly for a day”.


We ask Shannon about his workload and what other tasks he has to do. Full-stack development takes up 60-70% of his time; the other 30-40% is planning & coordination with other people in his own and other teams. Communication skills are identified as the top generic skills required for IT professionals (Burning Glass Technologies 2018), so it comes as no surprise to hear that communication is a huge part of what he does. Shannon says, “IT guys are generally not just in the basement anymore” there is lots of meetings and catchups to attend”.


One of his key tasks includes providing demonstrations to the business; this allows them to get feedback on the product in development and make changes as required. Communication & troubleshooting skills are paramount when they encounter problems in the development process, something doesn’t work as designed, or what the customer is asking for is not feasible. Shannon and his team then have to work with each other and the wider business to find the best solution.


Shannon spends most of his time working with the other developers on his team, especially the lead developer, but also works with the General Manager in charge of IT. There are also a number of stakeholders across Swissport that he works with depending on the project. These include station managers, different project managers and “if we are lucky” a Business Analyst. “Business analysts help guide businesses in improving processes, products, services and software through data analysis. These agile workers straddle the line between IT and the business to help bridge the gap and improve efficiency.” (Pratt & White 2019)


Some Business Analyst Jobs Require Superhero Skills

Figure 1: Some Business Analyst Jobs Require Superhero Skills


Occasionally Shannon also gets to interact with end-users when a new product goes live but admits this “is only if I’m unlucky” as it’s usually a job handled by the helpdesk or tech support crew.


We discuss where the project ideas come from; I’m intrigued to learn that the vast majority of the idea generation comes from the business; however, Shannon and his team have plenty of input into how the product/project will be developed. For example, his team made the decision to use the Microservices back-end and Angular Front-End architecture currently deployed at Swissport, but Shannon says, “we probably could have sold them on a… Docker Swarm Back-End and React Front-End” solution


And whilst they aren’t proposing project ideas, his team are still conscious of future opportunities; he knows that given the volume of data Swissport are handling, it’s likely they will want to do something with machine learning applications in the future. They are checking in with the team to see if anyone already has expertise in the area in order to meet the need when the business asks.


For Shannon bringing all of the ideas and solutions together, especially figuring out the challenging tasks, makes it all worthwhile.


Our half an hour with Shannon has flown by, and we close out the interview asking for advice on how to follow in his footsteps. Shannon's advice is simple:



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