Hi, I'm Alex.

Solo developer

I make AutoGem Studio, a browser extension that automates image generation in the browser. It has 115+ registered users. The extension is TypeScript, accounts and server logic run on Supabase, and the website is Laravel.

I lean heavily on AI coding tools, and I have different models review each other's changes before I merge anything. On the side I've built a solar system simulation and I'm working on a Rust port of Civilization III.

Backend Lead (contract)

TNMonex is an established remittance company launching a new mobile app. I led two other engineers building the Go backend that connects the app to their existing systems, and worked out the requirements with management, operations, and QA.

I built user accounts and a single payment gateway over Stripe and CyberSource: saved (tokenized) cards, authorize and capture, voids and cancellations, and rules for choosing which processor handles each payment. The app was in final client QA when my contract ended.

Co-founder & Software Engineer

Schoolbird connects middle and high school students with tutors. I was responsible for the Flutter app, the website, and our internal admin tools, working alongside my technical co-founder and managing two remote frontend developers.

The operations team matched tutors to students by hand, so I built them dashboards for tutor availability and job status and a map (OpenStreetMap) of where everyone was. That saved them roughly 10 hours a week.

I also built live location tracking, so tutors could find a family's home and parents could see when the tutor was about to arrive. Most of the work was making it behave on flaky mobile connections and smoothing out jumpy location updates.

Senior Software Engineer

Beat45 is a music video streaming service. I built its first PHP backend, its Roku app, and its Flutter mobile app, which had a custom video player and RTMP live streaming.

When we rewrote the backend in Rails, I moved the data over, writing Ruby scripts to map records from the old schema to the new one. I also sped up slow admin pages by fixing ORM queries and dropping to raw SQL where needed.

Videos buffered too often and their volume varied from one to the next, so I set up an FFmpeg processing worker on EC2 and tuned its compression and audio normalization with the company's in-house DJs.

Mobile Lead · started as an intern, full-time from May 2017

chao! lets restaurants run promotions, hand out QR-code coupons, and keep loyalty points for their customers. I owned the native Android app and later rewrote it in Flutter so it ran on iOS too.

On the Java / MariaDB backend I worked on coupons and loyalty, including the ledger that tracked each business's reward points.