Meet Alan Pearce, Senior Fullstack Developer at SatoshiPay
A few weeks ago, SatoshiPay was busy adding new clients when we found out the platform supporting our product was phasing out. Fortunately, we were able to smoothly transition thanks to our Senior Fullstack Developer, Alan Pearce. Alan has been with us for the last nine months and brings dedication and great ideas to our team.
Alan finished his studies at Northampton College, where his first interest in coding began with Pascal, a course launching his journey to become what he is today: developer and systems administrator extraordinaire. Alan’s enthusiasm for his work is easy to see, from his desk setup, pictured below, to his contributions back to GNU Emacs packages and infrastructure tools.
Alan describes his tech stack:
I run a highly-customised setup featuring a Keyboardio Model 01 keyboard and a trackball, with everything on an adjustable standing desk. My computers run a particular GNU/Linux distribution called NixOS, which brings functional and declarative programming concepts to the operating system level. A tiling window manager (i3) enables me to lay out my windows efficiently. Emacs is where I live, pretty much everything I do from writing code to managing my budget all happen here. I actually believe that Vim is the superior text editor, so I use the evil emulation layer in Emacs to get the feeling of Vim.
A self-taught coder with experience
Alan holds experience working as a Senior Software Engineer at Spotcap in Berlin and a Senior Web Developer at StudentCrowd in Loughborough, UK. Alan gives back to the developer community, contributing open source code on GitLab and writing a personal coding blog.
He also dedicated volunteer time to update the website for Learning for the Fourth Age, a charity programme empowering senior citizens to continue learning.
Keeping SatoshiPay Ready
Everyone on the team was working towards our launch on The Register, a large UK tech publication (along with several other clients and partnerships). While business was running smoothly, we were quite busy when we got news we’d need to make some unplanned changes requiring quite a bit of research.
We received a notice our orchestration platform for Docker microservice containers was going to shut down. Alan heavily researched the best solution, keeping our product available against this deadline. We selected Kubernetes based on Alan’s research. Alan migrated our main stack, allowing our team to continue focusing on its work without interruption. Bravo!
In addition to migrating our platform in this critical situation, Alan has also improved our CircleCI continuous integration pipeline to run tasks in parallel and modernised our Docker setup. He also created a chatbot called Strooper based on Hubot from GitHub. He’s also created other bots and Slack integrations to help us monitor business metrics.
Meinhard Benn, CEO of SatoshiPay states:
Alan has already given us bragging rights and we’re happy to have him on board. We can’t wait to see his next breakthrough idea!
Alan also highlights SatoshiPay as an excellent work environment. When asked what makes him enjoy working at SatoshiPay, Alan explains:
The team appreciates research and investigation, making contributing a great experience as most companies don’t offer this kind of freedom.
He also values our team:
Everyone cares about what they do and they’re all genuinely nice. The dev team cares about doing things well and has respectful discussions. There’s a focus on doing the right thing, not simply moving tickets from to-do to done with the least amount of effort.
When Alan isn’t coding and researching at SatoshiPay, he enjoys playing just about any first person shooter, RPG, or racing game. Alan is also an avid non-fiction reader and practices meditation.
We are extremely glad that Alan continues to support and streamline our dev team, we look forward to his continued success at SatoshiPay.
Follow us on Twitter @SatoshiPay to stay up to date with our latest developments and check our jobs page if you are interested in working at SatoshiPay!
Meinhard Benn, CEO at SatoshiPay
