About

Introduction

My name is Alex Aitken, and I’m an AVP of Engineering at Buakalapak. I’m currently living in Jakarta, but my previous destinations have been Berlin, Bangkok, Munich, and Auckland. I’m a motivated leader with experience building products from the ground up. I’m also a writer when I get the time and have written (but not published) two novels. If you want to get in touch, feel free to contact me.

Why trust me?

If you’re reading this website, you’re probably wondering why you should trust me as a source of development leadership. Well, below in technologies I explain what I’ve used and learned lessons from during my development experience. I have over twelve years of software engineering experience for quite a few international companies. If you see anything wrong or you disagree, please leave a comment. I’m always happy for constructive criticism and feedback.

Technologies

At Bukalapak, I help several tribes. Everything from the marketplace, our incubation arm, sales channels, and our gamification tribe. We use Golang or Ruby in our backend, moving towards Flutter in mobile apps, and Vue.js for the frontend.

In the Financial Services team, we’re building up the payment engine for Traveloka. We run everything from Rewards (points and gift vouchers) to incoming/outgoing payments. We’re looking at problems such as how can we make payment more flexible or how can we reward people to keep them coming back.

In the Identity team, we’re stabilising the Identity solution for Careem, which involves implementing the OAuth2 and OpenId Connect protocols for all of Careem and eventually third parties. We’re looking at problems like SSO (Single Sign-On) and privacy-related issues. We have a load of services we took over, so we’re always on the lookout for backend engineers, and app engineers (also web).

At Careem for Business, we used React and Redux for our Single Page App (Webpack/CSS Modules etc. included). We’re always on the lookout for awesome engineers for front-end development as well as backend development. We used Node JS to serve and render our website and Kotlin to manage our connections to the nitty-gritty stuff (aka abstractions from other Careem services).

At Agoda Homes, we used React for our Single Page App. We moved to Redux when we realised that we need to be able to manage state in a better way. We use SASS with BootStrap 3 as our CSS base and use Webpack to compile and minify our code. Our backend technologies are a mix of microservices for things like bookings, properties, and supply. We have a lot of build servers that run and deploy our Dev, and QA environments.

At Teqcycle, we used .NET MVC to create a multi-language, multi-currency website. We used Angular for some of our internal products and used vanilla JavaScript for the website.

At Check24, we used a .NET Nancy website to create the Hausratversicherung website. We used Angular as our front-end technology with LESS uses as the compiler to CSS. We used Webpack to compile and minify our code and had build servers to deploy to Dev, QA, and Production.

Finally, at Intergen, I worked on a vast range of projects. Anywhere from WinForms, to Silverlight, to apps for Windows using JS.