Who I learned from · 2017–2018
Alex Simms
Alex hired me at Trackem in May 2017, trained me, and supervised every build of my first year as a developer: WhereSafe, the King’s Christian registration site and the server migrations. He believed in my ideas and let me prove them, and that is where my confidence in my own work comes from.
Who I learned from
- Who
- Alex Simms
- Role
- Director of Operations, Trackem
- To me
- The manager who hired me in four days, believed in my ideas and took the heat while I worked things out.
- When
- 2017–2018
Who Alex is
Director of Operations at Trackem, the Brantford GPS and telematics company, and my direct supervisor through my first year there.
How we met
Alex invited me to interview for a full-stack .NET role on May 1, 2017. After the interview on May 2, Alex told me I was the kind of person they wanted. On May 4 I was back to talk about an offer, and on May 5 SQL Server training material landed in my inbox.
What I learned
Confidence in my own work. Alex believed in my ideas and let me validate them, and when something took longer than expected or was not working, he took the heat so I could keep going until I had solved it. He also taught me that seven minutes late is still late.
The big migrations
Alex kept me motivated through the biggest jobs we took on, like moving the platform off Google Maps to a new geocoding service. On July 30, 2017 we ran a server migration that did not go to plan: devices would not reach the new servers, so we worked through the night, reverted, and agreed on what to do differently. The database migration that September went through. Alex supervised the King’s Christian registration site that August, with its notification engine emailing about 28,000 records, and my first year of WhereSafe work. Every rollback plan I write for a client started that night.