‍Welcome to Fluid Truck’s Trucker Spotlight blog! We love highlighting our awesome Truckers and introducing you to the great people behind Fluid Truck.

At Fluid Truck, our product is people. We bring in smart, talented people with a lot of ambition and give them the opportunity to grow and expand their skill sets rapidly. Our end goal is to equip every person who joins our team with the skills they need to one day grow beyond us and create incredible things on their own. Interviews are edited for clarity.

Alex is the Telematics Operations Manager at Fluid Truck. “What are telematics?” You may ask -- Telematics are the hardware and software that allow Fluid Truck vehicles to connect to the app. It’s really the backbone of Fluid Truck itself! Each vehicle is equipped with this hardware that “talks” to the Fluid Truck app and allows users to lock and unlock their vehicle remotely, track location, and dozens of other functions.

Keep reading to learn more about what makes Alex an awesome addition to the Fluid Truck team!

What’s your favorite part of your job?

I really like being in contact with all of the cool software and hardware we have access to. The next gen telematics device is going to be really cool. We're almost ready to deploy it to vehicles in the field. I love getting to talk to the other team members about the features and capabilities of the tools and devices they work on 

When you aren’t working, what are you usually doing?

Recently I've been prepping our household for the arrival of our baby girl in October! I’ve taken on a few home-construction projects; tearing down a shed and replacing it with a pergola/patio, finishing up the nursery, deep cleaning the house, adding raised garden beds with arches to hold fruit and veggies up, etc. Lots of work around the house and garden!

Tell us about your pets.

I have two very good dogs, Archie and Piper. Piper is a very sweet labradoodle, and Archie is a soft-hair Wheaten terrier who may or may not be known to bite people... but he does great with family members!

What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?

As much as I absolutely love my job with Fluid, the best advice I’ve received regarding work in general is to travel. Travel as much as you can. Hannah and I just took a “baby-moon” to Switzerland and Italy and had a blast! We spent a few days hiking and biking a bunch in the Alps and then stayed on Lake Como in Italy. Leo actually grew up not far from where we stayed, and was kind enough to give us some recommendations on where to eat and what to do! Traveling is so much fun, a great way to get to know other people, and will give you memories that last a lifetime. It's the most important thing you can do with your time, and it's so much easier when you're younger. 

What’s your favorite snack while you’re working?

I can't stop drinking Waterloo sparkling waters. Strawberry is my favorite. The ones at the office seem to be super-chilled, so they’re extra crispy

If you could have a Fluid Truck full of one thing, what would you want it to be?

Recycled computer parts. That's like finding buried treasure to me. There’s something about taking something that seems to be broken or too old or useless and fixing it up and putting it to good use that is incredibly rewarding to me. When I help someone clean out their house or move, I always want their old busted computer stuff, it's almost an obsession. 

What would you tell someone who wants to come work at Fluid Truck?

I think the greatest part about working here is that at Fluid Truck I feel like I'm helping build the world that I get to live in. I get to build the infrastructure that runs our modern world. It's such an invigorating and rewarding feeling to be a part of a team that has such a evident and positive effect on our society.

What motivates you at work?

The same reason I’d tell someone to work here –– The feeling of getting to build the world that I live in, and being able to use all of the cool tools we have available to do that. 

Do you have a favorite song lyric?

From Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather” –– "But if I had the stars of the darkest night and the diamonds from the deepest ocean, I'd forsake them all for your sweet kiss”

It's such a beautiful lyric. Listening to these songs I really like being able to put myself in positions I'd never really be in. In the song, the woman is leaving her lover to go to Spain and asks if there’s something she can send so he can remember her. Not picking up on the clue, the man asks her just to come home, saying the above line. He finally realizes this is goodbye forever and asks for “Spanish boots of Spanish leather” as a token of remembrance. Now I’ve never had a lover desert me to go to Spain. But when I hear this song, I feel like I have. I am in awe that Bob Dylan (and many others) can transfer thoughts, ideas, and emotions to people through their artistic media. 

If you had a TED Talk, what would it be about?

I’ve been building and messing with computers for decades now. I have 5-6 of them running in my basement right now, providing services similar to Netflix, Dropbox, NordVPN, etc. I realized a few years ago this is a somewhat common hobby called a “Homelab”. The big benefit to doing this, other than self-education, is being in complete control of my data and the code that runs next to it. After having to set up and securely connect lots of different computers in my house, truck, and in the cloud, I think I could give a decent TED Talk about the networking of a homelab. For anyone curious, I use a multi-peer Wireguard connection with redundant pi-hole DNS servers managed by orbital-sync.

Do you have a guilty pleasure?

Chocolate chip cookies and whiskey. Enjoyed separately. Together would be sacrilege.

Want to work somewhere where you can work with cool tools and even cooler people? Click here to check out open positions at Fluid Truck.