D-code Portait: Alexandre Galinier, CTO at SchoolMouv
Before starting, could you please introduce yourself? Who are you, what’s your startup, what’s your role?
I’m Alexandre Galinier, I’m the CTO for Schoolmouv. The company aims to provide more support to students (11–18 y.o.) outside of school hours, to help them realise their potential.
Code 👩💻
Have you always been interested in engineering / coding?
Except for when I was 8 and wanted to be a waiter, YES. At least, I was always interested in computers and how they work.
What were your first experiences in coding?
It was with games. I’m 33, and when I was young games could easily be enhanced or cheated by changing some code inside their files.
(It might be the same today, but I don’t take the time to find out anymore :)
I feel better but still feel like I’m half-CTO, half-lead dev.
Leadership ✊
What were your biggest fears when you became CTO?
Provoking the company’s demise. I knew how to deal with software engineering teams, I was a tech lead before, but being CTO, especially in a small company like mine, means a lot of critical decisions which could lead to important production failures if they are not well managed.
How do you feel in the role today? What does your day-to-day look like?
I feel better but still feel like I’m half-CTO, half-lead dev.
My day-to-day is 80% CTO work — team management, hiring, meeting and fixing organisational issues; then I have 70% coding/pull request reviews or architecture discussions (No, the percentages aren’t a mistake, I work extra hours every week).
What challenge(s) that you’ve overcome with your engineering team are you most proud of?
Moving from a monolithic structure to a micro-service architecture both on the infrastructure side and the application side — the team is now far more relaxed and can move faster with new features.
Evolution 🦄
How have you evolved professionally in your role?
Let’s just say, “a lot” — that’s the good part of my position and why I can accept (for now!) the need to work extra hours.
How have you evolved personally?
I’m not sure about the evolution, but I’ve now got a better understanding of what kind of person I want to work with and how I should manage my time.
Tips 🗒️
If you had to name one impressive CTO, who would it be? Why?
I don’t follow a lot of CTOs, I do look around and discuss/search for what seem to be good ways to manage a team to ensure good conduct, motivation and learning in a technical environment (tools and processes to ensure better results).
What would you recommend that aspiring CTOs read or learn?
For books: Rework, Pragmatic Programmer, Release It and The Manager’s Path. Then any events like The Family’s CTO events :) or conferences (which are usually also on Youtube) where company CTOs are talking.
If you had to start all over again, what would you implement from day one to perform better in your current role as a tech leader?
Teaching/Testing other C-levels in the company to ensure:
- I have all the freedom I need to build a successful team
- Refactoring, bugs, time for technical debt, docs,… are all part of the software lifecycle, we should not fight them, just embrace them and integrate them in our processes.
Big thanks to Alexandre for taking part in D-code!
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Reach out to me with any comments, questions or suggestions you might have about D-code: vladimir@thefamily.co 💌
PS: Thanks Kyle for helping me with the article 🧡
