A love of tech and travel

He now works for Catalyst IT, an open source, software development company that he established ties with whilst he was studying.  

Alex didn’t have a lot of experience or knowledge in tech, specialising in biology and the sciences in high school. 

“It was a huge step up not having that background, but the tutors at NMIT supported me well,” Alex says.  

He particularly enjoyed the smaller class sizes at the Nelson campus, allowing him more one-on-one time with his tutors. This contributed to him becoming the top student in the IT faculty for the three years he took to gain his degree. 

“Having easier access to tutors was important to me,” he says. “The courses were very practical as well, which made the transition into a tech career easier.” 

 Alex believes NMIT’s rich connections with local industry partners is a key element to the successful execution of the IT degree programme. 

“There was a lot of interaction with industry,” Alex says. “Industry representatives would come and talk about a real-life scenario and ask us questions. Our assignments would be around creating a solution to fix that problem.” 

“For my third-year research or work-place project, I did my project on the Koha Library Management System, with Catalyst support. It was great to combine work with study. It also enabled me to gain full-time employment at Catalyst after graduating.” 

Alex enjoys travelling and has just returned from a week in Guatemala and two and a half weeks in Morocco.  

“I really enjoy volunteering whilst I’m overseas,” he says. “I have volunteered at an orphanage doing craft afternoons and helped with medical treatment of the 3000 odd street cats in Essaouira.” 

Alex is a remote full-stack web developer and project manager at Catalyst IT(external link). His team, Rōpū kohinga(external link), supports libraries and organisations to care for and showcase their collections.  

He has worked on the open-source software Koha for almost 8 years. Created in New Zealand in 1999, it is now used by over 18,000 libraries worldwide. 

"Every time I write a Koha code enhancement, and it is upstreamed, it's a thrill to know it will make a difference to the working lives of thousands of librarians and library users around the world," Alex says. 

Alex enjoys the variety of his job. He not only codes, but trains clients and talks to customers, working out the best software solutions for them.   

Recently he has been supporting two other collection management systems, VuFind and DSpace. Alex has worked on a wide range of interesting projects including a world-first rainbow research collection portal Ia – the Rainbow Collection(external link), for Auckland University of Technology (AUT). 

Learn more about the NMIT Computing and Information Technology programmes(external link).