About

// who I am and what this blog is about

I'm Alex Chen, a senior software engineer based in San Francisco. I work on distributed systems and developer tooling at a fintech startup, and I've been building things for the web for about eleven years.

This blog is where I think out loud about things I'm working through: a concept I finally understood, a decision I regretted, a tool I found genuinely useful or genuinely terrible. I write about JavaScript and the web platform because that's my primary environment, but I try to focus on principles rather than specifics — the specific framework will change, the underlying problem usually won't.

Background

I studied computer science at UC San Diego, where I spent more time in the sun than I should have and less time on formal methods than I probably needed. My first job was at a startup building developer tools, which set a pattern: I'm most interested in the infrastructure other engineers use to build things.

Over the years I've worked at companies ranging from 8-person seed-stage startups to public companies with thousands of engineers. The scale differences are interesting: the problems are the same at different magnitudes, but the solutions often look completely different.

Technical interests

JavaScript / Web
The browser platform, ES modules, performance, CSS architecture, and why we keep rebuilding the same abstractions.
Distributed Systems
Consensus, replication, observability. Currently thinking a lot about consistency models in event-driven architectures.
LLMs & AI
Not the hype — the mechanics. How these models actually work, where they fail, and how to build reliable systems on top of them.
Developer Tooling
Build systems, language servers, debugging tools, developer experience. Tools that multiply productivity or destroy it.

Timeline

  • 2024–now

    Senior Software Engineer, Meridian Financial

    Building the infrastructure layer for real-time payment processing. Lots of Kafka, PostgreSQL, and Go.

  • 2021–24

    Staff Engineer, Forma

    Led the platform team at a B2B SaaS startup. Built the internal component system and the API gateway that everything talks to.

  • 2019–21

    Software Engineer, Sourcegraph

    Worked on code intelligence features — hover tooltips, go-to-definition, find references — across multiple languages.

  • 2016–19

    Frontend Engineer, Mixpanel

    First real job. Learned what scale actually means. Spent a lot of time on data visualization and query performance.

  • 2015–16

    BS Computer Science, UC San Diego

    Graduated. Immediately forgot most of what I learned in theory courses. Still use graphs and dynamic programming regularly.

About this site

NullByte Dev is built with Node.js, plain HTML, and a single CSS file. No JavaScript framework. No build step for the content pages. The only client-side JavaScript is a small analytics script and some UI niceties (reading progress bar, TOC highlighting).

I write in Markdown, run a build script to generate HTML, and serve static files from a VPS. The whole setup took a weekend to build and I've touched the infrastructure exactly twice since then.

The contact form actually works — I read all messages, though I'm slow to respond.