Hey, I'm Alex Daskalov.
Below is an outline of my interests,
outlooks, and competencies. It's a page that attempts to answer
the question “What do you do?”
With a wide range of interests, I often struggle to answer this question in a rigid format, preferring instead to get it across in conversation, but for the stray and curious, here is a non-exhaustive list. Reach out if you'd like to learn more, I love meeting people.
People
There's no priority to the ordering in this list, with the exception of this item, which is first for a reason. I have enough internal motivation to have had a lot of fun building products on my own, but have found that the greatest pursuits come from assembling bands of individuals motivated by a cause. Compared to building systems with bolts or bits, an assemblage of people is the hardest to get right, but the most rewarding when it comes together. I subscribe to the obsoletion mode of scaling—start small with a core team that has the competencies to cover all areas, and begin replacing bottle-necking functions with specialists.
Anthropology, Psychology, & Sociology
Where people above refers to the people we work with in pursuit of a common goal, there's a much wider view of people, at the scale of society at large. Ultimately, technology is useless if it doesn't affect people on the ground, and what motivates me to continue working in tech is understanding the human systems that comprise our society, especially with regard to how they function as a dynamic system that changes over time in response to the technological capabilities afforded to them.
Software
Anything impactful I've ever done has involved software in some capacity. Over the course of my life I've slowly slowly realized how transformative it has been, and am still learning how much further it can morph society. Growing up with it, I've gone from viewing it as a discipline and technology like any other with an associated industry, to something closer to a general purpose technology that will eventually alter most human pursuits.
Graphic Design
I credit my early interest in design generally, and graphic design specifically with my interest in software. What started as perusing print design journals in the library led to an interest in digital design, and eventually to making my first web pages. Quickly thereafter, I grew bored of static content, leading to a need for programmatic manipulation. Still, my original interest stays strong, and the two complement each other such that the more I pursue one, the more it forces my understanding of the other.
UI/UX
My interest in graphic design led quickly into spending most of my time thinking about the aesthetics of user interfaces, before learning that the usability of products was much more involved than simply getting the visuals right. I labour over the usability of the interfaces I create, and spend a of time thinking about the nature of interaction and experience.