Hey everyone, I'm Alex, and I'm the lead system engineer at Wildbit. I live just outside Minneapolis, MN, with my wife, son, and daughter.
I started off in tech learning how to prank people by sending spoofed emails. This was considerably simpler in the days of open relays, no DKIM, and no SPF.
My first real tech job was in high school, for an online real estate firm. We listed properties directly on the MLS without taking a seller agent commission. It was a small company, but it gave me a chance to support my first SaaS project, and touch all kinds of different tech. We had an ancient PBX for customer service calls that we didn't have any documentation for, and my first project was decoding the RS232 debug output and writing a call tracking system linked into our CRM.
From there, I did tech support work for Apple, sorting out escalated technical and safety issues with the original and 3G iPhone.
Shortly afterwards, I went back into system administration for another SaaS company, GovDelivery. We handled social media coordination for government agencies, sending everything from county snow emergency notices, to White House press corp notices, to AMBER alerts. I led several of our products through FedRAMP and ISO27001 certification, and was responsible for the technical aspects of 2 of our 3 products.
I ended up seeing a posting for a sysadmin role at Fog Creek Software, and jumped on it. Shortly after getting married (the next day, actually) my wife, daughter, and I packed up and moved to Brooklyn, NY. We lived there for about two years, taking frequent trips to Prospect Park and the BK Botanical Gardens inbetween working on Fogbugz, Kiln, Gomix, and bits of Trello and Stack Exchange here and there.
A few months before my son was born, the option for remote work came up at Fog Creek, and we jumped on the chance to move back closer to family (and lower rents). I worked remotely as the lead sysadmin at Fog Creek for another year before finding out Wildbit was hiring and coming over to the team.
Outside of work, my days are mostly filled with selling girl scout cookies, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and figuring out what kind of food my son wants when he keeps yelling 'Yummy'.