Meet the Nivo team: Introducing Christine Altmann, Software Developer

Next up in our series: Meet the Nivo team, we caught up with Software Developer, Christine Altmann, who joined in November 2019, to share her role and responsibilities, thoughts on working at Nivo and her core values.

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Hi Christine, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

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Hi, my name is Christine, and when I am not working on one of Nivo’s features, I enjoy spending my time with family and friends. Which at this point takes me to many different places and countries. Nivo has enabled me to have great flexibility, allowing me to work from a variety of locations.

I was born and raised in Bavaria, Germany and enjoy being surrounded by nature, so whenever possible, I like to get out of the city, somewhere there's fresh air and nice rock to climb. Rock climbing is pretty much my favourite thing to do in my spare time and has challenged me in the best ways while allowing me to explore incredible places.

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What do you do at Nivo?

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Being a part of Nivo’s development team, means working on whatever comes up.
From maintaining the platform to listening to our customers and crafting new user journeys that solve their problems.

We work in a supportive and inclusive team where everyone is allowed to bring their opinion to the table and to therefore influence where the product is going.
In the past year I have been particularly focussed on building our B2B solution.

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What is your past experience, for working in your position?

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Previously I was working as a Project Manager, delivering context-driven customer web experiences. While I really enjoyed the work that I did, I have always felt drawn towards code. I found myself tinkering with pixels and very basic code whenever something didn't quite look right in one of our projects.

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When I found Founders & Coders, a London based peer-led bootcamp aiming to help people from all backgrounds to get into tech, I was sold and quit my job. Working at Nivo has allowed me to grow as a developer ever since.

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What are the values that drive you?

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Simplicity
Software development is complex on many levels and code consists of many moving parts. Yet, simplicity is not the absence of complexity. Just removing clutter would result in an uncomplicated but meaningless product.

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As Steve Jobs says, “Simplicity it is the ultimate sophistication. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”

I aspire to produce simple, straight forward code which leads to simple and easily understandable user experiences.

Customer focus and Communication
I believe it is important that we take our customers along for the journey. That their needs are at the centre of everything we do and that we listen to them to calibrate our journey.

We build software for people and it’s built by people, so by making it a collaborative effort and doing so in a succinct way, we can make a dramatic impact.

On a more personal level: Diversity and Inclusion

I am proud to work in tech and for Nivo, a forward thinking company that focuses on training and development for individuals. But I am aware that not everyone is as lucky.

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Across the industry as a whole, I would love to see a more diverse workforce that includes the underrepresented people in tech and groups that have been historically excluded or too afraid to pursue a career in tech.

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