Meet the founder

Alex is a licensed marine engineer, former U.S. Navy Reserve officer, and self-taught software developer — a rare intersection of two industries that couldn’t be further apart. Software reinvents itself every few years; maritime has done things largely the same way for centuries. For more than five years, he sailed commercial vessels and helped run operations at The Vane Brothers Company. On the side, he taught himself to code and built Sea Trials from scratch. For five years he ran the whole thing solo — writing every line of code, shipping to every platform, answering every support ticket. Today it’s the leading U.S. Coast Guard exam prep platform on the market, trusted by 50,000+ mariners at a 4.8-star average across every app store.

Alex started in the maritime industry when he was just 15 — painting a water barge on the docks for The Vane Brothers Company in Baltimore, Maryland. The next year, he moved into their mechanic shop, rebuilding John Deere diesel engines. By 17, he was out on Vane Brothers tugs and barges — spending his summers in New York Harbor as a deckhand on a 4,200-horsepower towing vessel pushing a 50,000-barrel barge. The following year, he earned his Tankerman Person-In-Charge endorsement, loading and discharging dangerous liquid cargoes before he could legally drink.

At 18, he headed to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. He was elected Class President, sailed on commercial and Military Sealift Command vessels around the world, and delivered the commencement address for the Class of 2017.

After graduating with a B.S. in Marine Engineering, a commission as a Navy Reserve officer, and an unlimited horsepower U.S. Coast Guard engineer’s license, Alex began a five-year MARAD sailing obligation, shipping out with AMO as an engineer on tankers. From there he returned to his roots at Vane Brothers, sailing their vessels for years. When the company expanded to Seattle, he moved out there too, splitting his time between helping as a vessel supervisor and sailing on the vessels. He later transitioned to fleet supervisor in New York Harbor — bouncing between the engine room and the office for years, with Sea Trials growing alongside the whole time.

A year into his sailing obligation, on a tanker in 2018, Alex was reflecting on the painful process of studying for the unlimited horsepower license he was now sailing on — and realized USCG exam prep hadn’t moved in decades. Outdated books, zero feedback, no analytics. Half the questions referenced an illustration printed in a separate 500-page volume you had to flip through page by page to find. The moment he stepped off the ship, he started teaching himself to code and built the first iteration of Sea Trials, shipping it while still sailing full-time.

From there he picked up web, then Android, then full-stack development. In an industry as old as maritime, where ships routinely lose signal for days at a time, working offline wasn’t a feature to bolt on — it had to be designed into every layer of the product from day one.

For five years he ran the entire platform solo — development, design, customer support, analytics, everything — while maintaining a full-time maritime career. Sea Trials grew from zero to more than 50,000 mariners with an average 4.8-star rating across every app store.

In 2023, Sea Trials shipped one of the first AI tutors built specifically for the USCG exam — more than a chatbot, a foundation model grounded in the USCG question bank, the CFRs, and the regulations behind every answer. That same year, Alex stepped off the boats to focus on Sea Trials full-time.

Eight years later, no other study platform works the way Sea Trials does. Fully offline. Real cross-device sync. Native on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and the web — all from a single codebase. Most apps from the biggest names in tech don’t even attempt offline.

Most apps stop working the moment they lose signal. At sea, that’s most of the time.

Five platforms, one codebase, real-time sync, fully offline — that has to hold whether a mariner is on Wi-Fi at home or a month into a Pacific crossing. After five years building Sea Trials alone, Alex now runs a team that keeps that promise as the platform grows.

Underneath it all is a custom CI/CD pipeline that ships updates and builds for the App Store, Google Play, the Microsoft Store, macOS, and the web in a single flow, on top of a backend engineered to keep every device in step. Alex oversees the full product lifecycle, from architecture decisions to App Store releases.