Meet a Contentlian: Alex Ackerman
As a child, she wanted to be Batman. Today, she’s happy to be one of our senior developers.
Describe your path to Contently
I’m from Virginia Beach, Virginia and moved to New York to go to The New School, where I studied culture and media, and journalism. I didn’t know how to code, but was interested in data journalism. During my senior year, I worked with developers on a project called Data Toys that was all about exploring ways to tell stories with data. I ended up getting jealous of the developers because I wanted to be able to build my ideas!
From there, I earned a scholarship to General Assembly through Google, where I learned how to code. Then I spent nine months at an art marketplace startup, before deciding that I wanted to get back to media and storytelling.
What’s your day-to-day like?
I’m the tech lead on the content creation team, so a lot of my day centers around planning stories with the product team and figuring out associated dependencies. What are associated dependencies you ask? They’re things we need from other teams, or really anything we can’t do ourselves.
A big chunk of the day is spent actually coding and refactoring, and another big part of the day is working with the other “Product Pods.” We may come up with an idea for a feature but find that it’s really more in line with another department, or that customers should be able to use the feature at a different stage of the lifecycle.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
I have two answers for this. One, it was always really important to me that I be able to craft and code something that people use every day. Especially coming from journalism, I love making tools to help people write better content and create a bigger media world.
Two, I love working with everyone on the product team. They all have a unique point of view, and they’re smart, intelligent, caring, and generous with their time and ideas.
What’s one part of your job that people should know?
A lot of times people think that we just build new things, which isn’t the case. We spend a lot of time thinking about existing features and how we can make them better. We also think about the kind of code we’re leaving for future programmers. Coding is like a craft in that you can build it quickly, but it won’t be as clean for future coders, which makes it harder to work and improve on.
To put it another way, imagine taking someone who doesn’t write very well but writes a ton, and trying to get them to write like Hemingway. It’s all about getting rid of the unnecessary.
What are you most excited about for the coming quarter?
We have a really good foundation for our “Brand Assist” tool, and our goal is to get more people to use it. We’re also focusing more on the SEO and discoverability side of things, which is exciting from a tech perspective because we can offer a ton if we execute it well.
What was your dream job as a kid?
When I was really little, I wanted to be Batman. After that, I got (and still am) into video games, and thought about being a game developer. The programming languages that game developers use and website developers use can be different though, and gaming languages can be really intimidating to me. In high school and college, before getting into data journalism and coding, I wanted to be a director.
What’s your favorite Contently snack?
When we have them, Stacy’s Pita Chips, both the cinnamon kind and the salty ones.
