Alex Anderson
Senior Software Engineer
Alex has worked at Echobind for 18 months and lives in Virginia, but has been bouncing around lately and has his sights set on Utah. “I make fancy websites. It's what I do at Echobind and I like doing it on my spare time. I make a spaceship game called Thorium, where you can play as the crew of the Star Trek Enterprise ship where everyone gets their own job.” When he's not building digitally, he's baking delicious bread IRL, such as boules and focaccias. “I'm not one of those crazy people who does sourdough. That's a pet. I don't want to have a pet.”
Least Favorite Emoji
Slightly Smiling
Favorite Holiday Movie
The Muppet Christmas Carol
Who would dress up like Santa in Echobind?
Kaila
Most Used App?
Twitter. Regrettably, but also not regrettably. Also, it's Twitter.
Food that doesn't get enough credit
Bread
Where would you like the next Echobind Retreat to be?
Snowbird (Ski Resort) or Sundance (Resort) in Utah; do a little ski slopes action.
Projects you loved most in 2023
Memento Video (creating a new video renderer for them to have fancy videos for their customers) and also Hope Media Group's new website with fresh CMS and new design.
Your Personal peak/high of the year
Revamped Echobind's styling system during his allotted “Investment Time” from Chakra UI with pre-styled components to Tailwind CSS (which is more foundational and fundamental) and shadcn/ui. Alex was focused on helping the Echobind website run faster (which he did), but when he presented his findings, he realized the staff also loved how much better of a developer experience it created, as well. “It was a 2-for-1 for making the whole experience better. So that was a big win: Being able to write that up, get positive feedback on it, and implement it this year.“
Advice you'd give January 2023 version of yourself
Take a look at your opportunity cost right now, and see if you're balancing things the right way. Are there better ways to spend your time that would make a bigger impact or difference in the future? There's a tendency to fall into the sunk cost fallacy where you're like, ‘I'm already halfway through. Might as well keep trudging.' But, oftentimes there are better things you can do and you should not consider anything you've done in the past but what it takes to get you into the future.
Favorite work-from-home perk or accessory:
Every now and then my wife will also work from home and it is really nice being able to have my favorite person in literally the entire world working side by side with me. That's really pleasant.