I currently work for GS remotely in Austin, Texas.
For a summary on my past roles, hover over text on the left.
For more details, click here to open my resume in a new tab.
I'm Alex, a web developer and designer creating digital assets, experiences and products. That includes UX for web apps, logos, ads, eLearnings, and so on. If it can be created on a screen, there's a good chance that I have several '.FINAL-FINAL-FINAL' versions of it saved on my Mac.
I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. As a 'latch-key' kid, I spent a lot of my childhood either in a book or game console. In high school, I wandered around art musuems, modded games and listened to Pink Floyd and Kanye West on repeat. Those early experiences of living in different worlds influenced my love of creation and the path that I'm on today.
I graduated from the University of Scranton in 2015 with a degree in Strategic Communications. At the time, corporate America didn't interest me so I chose the startup life. I consulted under the name Alexander & Company, which led me to a software engineering internship in SoHo and a rollercoaster ride of a career. Every moment has given me a broader perspective on building great products for diverse sets of people.
Today I'm a product manager at Goldman Sachs, where I use my unique blend of engineering, design and content skills to run a platform used by thousands of people across the world.
Goldman Sachs has a lot of 'firsts' for my career - working in an office full time, financial services, and a large organization. This role gave me an incredible education on the importance of collaboration and communication across teams and projects.
In my time at the firm, I've focused on a ground-up redesign of an internal platform. Beyond visual improvements, this includes deeply understanding what a growing number of users needs from the platform.
Scalr changed my perspective on everything a company could offer. I learned what makes a business work - passionate and strong leadership, interconnected teams, and consistency in product development, vision and communication. The Product Marketing team educated me on the relationship between sales & marketing, generating leads and connecting with end users.
After teaching myself how to code over six months (Angular 1 and Ruby), I got an internship as a full stack engineer. I learned about the fundamentals of working with an experienced team, how to code in an evolving organization, the depth of great design, and how the social world of startups worked.
After college, I was determined to run my own business. I started consulting from my bedroom and eventually moved to a WeWork. It was a crucial time for me - I learned to take absolute responsbility as a business owner and push complex projects to completion.
College was an incredible mix of personal freedom, friendships and memories. I earned a degree in Strategic Communications that balanced business skills with the fundamentals of design, advertising and marketing.
Below are several recent personal projects. The goal beyond creativity is to simulate product creation - identifying the potential user and their needs, designing individual features and thinking through a roadmap, key metrics and launch strategy.
Coach is a daily SMS text bot that sends me a text (using Flask + Twilio API) with my goals for the quarter - as both a motivation and a reminder. I also have a simple UI to CRUD these goals. In addition, I can text Coach to reflect, in-the-moment, on any recent decisions I’ve made. At the end of the week, I get a summary email with a list of any reflections I’ve texted. There’s also less interesting stuff, like bill and birthday reminders. Coach is an on-going project - the more I’ll think about the features I need in daily life, I can use Coach to build and integrate them into my life.
Commodity Explorer is a web app for exploring, charting, and predicting prices for commodities across different industries. Built with a React front end, Node.js backend, CI/CD pipleine via GitLab and is deployed on AWS. The goals of this project were to build a product that worked with extensive financial data from multiple sources, develop another tool with real-world utility, and to push myself in terms of complexity of state management. WIP to be finished in Q1 2020 with ability to query data for bonds and T-Bills.
Greenmetrics is a dashboard for viewing digital assets, handling the algorithmic trading of Ether, Bitcoin, and Litecoin. It was also the system I used to organize the mining lower tier digital currencies. The dashboard is built on React and Node.js. I used the Coinbase, Kraken, & Coindesk APIs to determine price differences on each exchange and run abritrage plays. I used Highcharts.js to display data. The project no longer mines currencies or completes trades.
My first attempt at a consumer facing web product was Patron, a Facebook Messenger bot and web app for bar recommendations in NYC. The goal was a product that the end user would find interesting enough to try, and gain something from. The Messenger bot was built with Botkit and a MongoDB database. I also built a web app on React + Node.js, to interact with the collection outside of the bot, so you could search by borough, price, and bar type.
Let's work together.
Contact me using the email address below.