Growing up, Flowstar Alex Cowling was surrounded by gadgets and people who loved them, so it was no wonder she decided to follow a career in web development.
For her, web development is not just a job, but a career and a way of life and she enjoys the fact that she gets paid to do her hobby.
Alex is Flow’s newly hired web developer; she has been in the web development industry for four and a half years.
She joined Flow earlier this month and quickly felt right at home at the programming studio under the stewardship of programming head Richard Frank.
Alex was working at Accenture as their front-end developer when she found out about Flow. “I googled ‘front-end companies’, came across Flow Communications, sent in my CV and now I’m here,” she says.
She describes herself as a solution-orientated person, hence her love for web development because she is constantly finding solutions for making systems better and sites easier for people to browse.
So far Alex says she has learnt a lot and has had to make adjustments from using Windows to using a Mac and Linux – a challenge she is really enjoying.
One of the things that impressed her about Flow is that her manager Richard doesn’t take no for an answer. “This has pushed me to do things that I thought I would never be able to do in terms of programming.”
Richard has nothing but praise for Alex. “It’s great to get someone who already has so much experience in CMS-based web development, having built more than 30 websites for corporate clients. She’s fitted in very quickly with the methodologies and frameworks we use,” he says.
Alex says the three things that stand out for her about Flow are the relaxed nature of the company, the open door policy of the managers and the focus on getting stuff done.
“We do cool work here and we are excited about what we do; no one bothers themselves about trivial things like where you sit, what colour the blinds are or the size of your desk. There is a sense that everybody loves their work and I love that. The bosses are very hands-on with small things and big things, and that’s good.”
In her new job Alex looks forward to carving her niche as a web developer and gaining a new set of skills.
When she joined Flow her short-term goal was to build her own website from scratch and now that she has already done that, Alex says she will focus on being an über-web-developer.
Apart from her techie side, Alex also has a creative side and she spends her free time designing websites, which she enjoys a lot.
In her spare time Alex likes spending time with her family, going to arcades and movies, watching TV series, and just being around family.
Her other passion is music and she would love to be in a band or involved in the music industry if she wasn’t doing what she is doing right now.