My name is Alex. I'm a driven engineering lead, and at work I enjoy both building teams and products.
Outside of work I enjoy travelling, music production and photography. And writing this blog. I'm also a perpetually injured runner.
Ask Me About
🏙 Architecture & Design: We're surrounded by ingenuity in buildings and everyday objects.🎵 Music: I'm an avid listener, and enjoy producing & playing electronic music under a pseudonym.
📰 Journalism: I love investigative and data reporting, and am always reading longform narratives like Bad Blood.
Secret Answers
🐠 My first pet was an Angel fish named Angel.💼 My favourite film director is Nolan.
♟️ My favourite boardgame is Chess.
🕹️ My favourite videogame is Super Metroid.
📺 I don't have a favourite TV series.
🔐 I'm not telling you if I use a password manager.
Skills
- 11 years commercial experience in full-stack software engineering, with JS, PHP, Java, Ruby and Golang: Utilising the overall-best-fit tools to solve a problem.
- Stakeholder management & requirement-gathering across business domains. Experience and knowledge of digital media domains.
- Team leadership & line-management experience, growing multi-disciplinary teams from the ground up through to feature delivery.
- Tracing, diagnosing and mitigating faults in diverse technical stacks — Legacy, distributed systems, etc.
- Solutions & application architecture throughout the stack, from front-end caching strategies to messaging patterns.
- Rich understanding of modern technologies, including in-development browser APIs, their adoption path and their business value.
Technical Proficiencies
- App: Electron, React Native, ReactJS
- Blockchain: Ethereum, Smart contracts
- CDN: Fastly, Varnish Plus, AWS CloudFront, Cloudflare
- Cloud Practioner: AWS (Lambda, S3, CloudFormation, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and more), DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform
- Configuration Management: Ansible, Puppet, Terraform
- Languages: JavaScript (TypeScript, Browser, ESNext, NodeJS), Golang, Rust, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP
- Operating Systems: macOS, FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, Debian/Ubuntu Linux
- Security: OWASP, PWK
- Testing: Cucumber/Gherkin, Jest, *Unit; Cypress, CircleCI, Jenkins
I am not actively seeking a full-time role, however you may see my full CV here, alternatively, please connect with me on LinkedIn. I am also available for consultancy.
Work Experience
- Dec 2024–Present: Staff Engineer, Business Platform Development, Money Forward
- Jan 2022–Nov 2024: Principal Engineer, Customer Products, Financial Times
- Jun 2022–Jan 2023: Acting Technical Director, Customer Products, Financial Times
- Jan 2021–Jan 2022: Principal Engineer, New Products & Enterprise, Financial Times
- Apr 2019–Jan 2021: Principal Engineer, FT Group Products, Financial Times
- Oct 2016–Apr 2019: Principal Developer, Bluetel
- Sep 2013–Oct 2016: Software Developer, Bluetel
- Sep 2009—Jul 2013: Part-Time Software Developer & SysAdmin, Freelance
