Setting The Tone with Alexia Leplus

Alexia has always wanted to work in the music industry, but she was unsure of the best way to get into it. She first decided to do a degree in English Studies, majoring in Information and Communication, with the idea of becoming a music writer, before discovering Web development. After two years, including a year of internship training in a company, she graduated from the [email protected] Ambition Féminine at Epitech. After working in fashion and financial communication, Alexia finally joined the field of her dreams by becoming a Software Developer at Believe in 2021.

What is the role of a Software Developer in the Content Management team?

The Content Management team, which I belong to, is in charge of data ingestion - i.e. the recording and processing of data - related to all new artist releases.

My job as a Software Developer is to improve our existing services, but more importantly to build new features that will make the whole process of creating a new release easier and faster for artists, producers, or their managers. The idea is to automate as much as possible this process so that they have as little work as possible to do.

What is the technical stack you work with on a daily basis? Is this stack common to all developers at Believe?

I'm lucky enough to be working on a brand new project, so we're mainly working with recent technologies. For the front end, we work with the JavaScript framework Svelte, and for the back end we rely on the Kafka platform, the PHP framework Symfony and the database management tool MongoDB.

This stack is not common to all Believe developers, as it depends on the projects and solutions my colleagues are working on. Some use Symfony like us, others do pure PHP or Java code. Each team adjusts according to the skills and the projects.

What is the most important technical challenge you have faced recently?

As I was saying, I'm working on a new project that is not yet in production, so fortunately we don't have any major problems for now. The most important challenge at the moment is perhaps to make our project co-exist with the existing solutions, because the technologies and tools used can be different. Moreover, we don't always have the necessary knowledge of these tools.

Does a developer working in music tech need to have a different approach to his role compared to other sectors?

Even if some specific areas may require specific skills, I am thinking for example of people working in the video team, I don't believe that as a developer you have to be specialized beforehand, you can learn on the job.

This is my own experience, I didn't start in the music industry and I am doing very well, because I can rely on Product Owners who know our products by heart, and managers who know the music world and can also help us. In fact, any developer can work in music tech if they are interested.

You talk about transforming our solutions into micro apps to improve performance, how is this important for Believe?

The transformation of our solutions into micro-apps is crucial because it allows us to avoid as many bugs as possible that can be generated by simultaneous development on our solutions and by the fact that different technologies can sometimes impact each other.

Even if the Believe ecosystem works as a whole, the fact that we are moving our solutions to micro-apps means that they can be developed independently by dedicated teams, with perfectly adapted technologies and better expertise. This will allow us to offer even more innovative solutions on the market.

What would you say to motivate a candidate interested in joining Believe?

For devs, and for others, I would say that you should join Believe if you have a real affinity with the music business. If you want to know how it works behind the scenes or if you want to work with people who are passionate about music, then Believe is the place to be and you'll love it.

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