“I want to help the next generation of developers with my acquired experience”

“I have an opportunity to contribute to society while doing what I love and working with the best people I have worked with,” is how Dušan Markovič describes his work at Better.

Dušan Markovič is a senior software developer at Better who designs, develops, and maintains the multitude of backend applications Better provides for its customers. He finds motivation for work in the vision of the company and in the great team he works with. “It’s fun to work where you can grow,” he told us and added that in the future, he would like to help develop a testing infrastructure that will safeguard apps and help keep the Better products stable. In his free time, he loves movies and sports, but his true passion is travel, and he tries to take a long trip every few years. To find out what was his last destination, how he feels about the trends in digital healthcare, and to learn more about Dušan, read the interview below.

As a backend developer, what is your main occupation/task at Better? How do you contribute to the development of Better digital health solutions?

Like my colleagues, I design, develop, and maintain the multitude of backend applications we provide for our customers. For the last few years, I’ve been working on data streaming, security, and containerisation. 

You have been with Better for more than 18 years, which is quite a long tenure in the tech industry. What has kept you motivated and engaged with the company for such a period of time? 

When I started, there were around 40 people sitting in a small hall, squeezed between closets and plants. I was lucky to start working with awesome people (shoutout to TomažD and BoštjanP), who took me under their wing and provided me with a great opportunity to learn. My motivation for sticking to one employer is working in healthcare, the vision of our company and our CEO, and the team I work with – it’s fun to work where you can grow. 

You have witnessed most of the company's important transformations. What were some of the biggest changes and advancements you have seen over the years? 

The biggest change was the split from Marand and focusing exclusively on healthcare. And the second biggest, I would say, was getting new offices and expanding to 150+ employees. 

You are part of the team at Better platform that develops some of the platform's main components, and you also test them yourself. Why is that so, and how does your work improve the platform’s performance?

Since the applications we develop are complex and full of domain knowledge that has quite a steep learning curve, we test them ourselves. But to be fair – most of the bugs are found by QA testing auxiliary frontend applications. The performance is maintained or sometimes improved with deliberate maintenance decisions supported by integration and stress testing. The biggest jumps in performance are correlated with larger infrastructure changes, but the latter is rarely possible for multiple reasons (time constraints, backwards compatibility, release cycle duration).

The key areas of your expertise are application and event-driven architecture, performance optimisations, and complex event processing. How do you use them to enhance the functionality and efficiency of the Better platform? 

Event-driven architecture and complex event processing go hand in hand and are primarily meant for data export and offline processing/analytics without too much of a performance impact on the platform's main components. Application architecture is a much wider (and older) field, and without getting into the weeds, for the last few years, I’ve been working on revamping the older codebases to a more modern state. At the moment I’m working on an integration testing framework. 

Looking ahead, what emerging trends or technologies in software development and digital healthcare are you most excited about, and how do you see Better incorporating these innovations into our platform? 

LLMs are all the hype now but incorporating them into our core products is a challenge because of the hallucinations they can produce – a big ‘no-no’ in healthcare. However, I do see machine learning as very useful in assisting applications like clinical decision systems and dictation-transcription. Outside of AI, I follow many technology advancements, but they are too low-level or “boring” to mention here. 

As someone who has been with the company for some time, what goals or aspirations do you have for the future of Better and your role within the team?

I would like to help develop a testing infrastructure that will safeguard apps from regression bugs and help keep our products stable. And being as senior as you love to point out, I would help the next generation of developers with my acquired experience. 😊 

What hobbies occupy your free time, and how do you like to unwind?

I am a bit of a filmophile and a geek, but I also enjoy sports – mountain biking, badminton/squash, and snowboarding are my favourites. I also enjoy diving and wakeboarding though these happen rarely. 

You love to travel, and you take at least one long trip every year. What was the last destination you visited, and what has stayed with you from that trip?

I love travelling, but unfortunately, a long trip only happens every two or three years. The last one was to Indonesia for about a month in March this year, and what I miss the most is the lack of stress and urgency our everyday lives at home bring. What stayed with me the most was Borneo with its jungles – I had never experienced anything like that before.

Which was your most memorable trip, and what did you learn there? Which destination or travel is the one that would you like to forget?

I would still consider my trip to Japan more than a decade ago as the most memorable – the culture, food, architecture, and nature are as foreign as they are fascinating. For a close second, I would choose New Zealand. I don’t really have travel destinations I’d like to forget, but the most emotionally difficult one was travelling alone around the Philippines after the 2011 tsunami. 

What does Better mean to you?

To me, Better presents an opportunity to contribute to society while doing what I love and working with the best people I have worked with.