Meet Manojkumar Murugesan, Developer Expert for NativeScript

Manojkumar Murugesan, Developer Expert for NativeScript, checks in from the Silicon Valley of India and talks about interesting projects he's recently worked on.

Manojkumar is well known as a prolific helper on the NativeScript Forums.

This post is part of our series featuring our Developer Experts, community members who represent the best of our products. Read about other featured experts here and meet more DEs here.

What's your background, professionally?

I'm a full-stack developer with over seven years of experience in building web and mobile applications.

Where are you based and why?

I'm based in Bengaluru now, because it's the Silicon Valley of India.

With whom are you working?

At present, I'm working with ALTEN Calsoft Labs. I'm also an active freelancer at Upwork.

What project are you working on now?

At present, I'm working on a mobile application that will act as a DMX lighting console.

What's the most interesting project you've done recently?

I wrote my first NativeScript plugin recently: nativescript-vector-icons. It basically creates a PNG version of your font icon so that it can be easily used with components like TabView, ActionItem, etc. It's a simple plugin, but I was badly missing that feature in my apps. Hope to find time soon to share a few more plugins in my list.

What are some challenges you are encountering now in your work?

I believe NativeScript already solved one of the biggest challenges I experienced in past years. I have been working with various SDKs for building mobile apps in the past years, started with Cordova, Sencha Touch, Ionic and later Titanium and React Native.

But everywhere, the ultimate problem was customization. No matter how many tools, libraries or plugins these SDKs had, at some point I needed to customize something in order to meet my customer's expectations. It was always a pain switching between JavaScript/Objective C/Java, compiling plugins, writing JS interfaces and spending hours to implement a simple feature. Sometimes we had to even compromise due to platform limitations.

Today, I'm happy that with NativeScript, everything is done in JavaScript and it's possible to do almost anything that a native app can do with Swift/Java.

Which of our products do you use and why?

I use NativeScript and Pro UI. In the past, I've also used Kendo UI and Fiddler.

In your experience, what's the biggest software pain point in the mind of your partners or clients?

The biggest pain point might be having to work on older applications to implement new features or to fix bugs. The software might have been built years ago, use an entirely different build flow, be slower and lack the latest features from your language or framework. Often it feels as if it could be easier to rewrite the entire application rather than fixing the old code.

For instance, recently I had to work with JavaScript, after TypeScript made me lazy for quite time now. It gets on my nerves when JavaScript throws a runtime exception and I have to go back into the code to trace down a simple mistake.