About me.
I fell in love with programming at 14 when I built my first website for a local skate shop. What started as a hobby quickly became a career obsession. Today, with over six years of professional experience, I specialize in building performant, accessible web applications that serve millions of users.
At Vercel, I work on the Next.js framework team, focusing on developer experience and performance optimization. Before that, I spent two years at Stripe designing and shipping the merchant dashboard used by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. My time at Google taught me how to build at scale and gave me a deep appreciation for design systems and component architecture.
Outside of work, I contribute to open-source projects, write about frontend architecture on my blog, and mentor early-career engineers. I believe the best code is the code that empowers other people to build great things.
Tech stack.
The tools and technologies I reach for every day.
React
My framework of choice for over five years. Deep expertise in hooks, concurrent features, server components, and custom rendering patterns.
TypeScript
Full type-safety advocate. I use TypeScript on every project — from strict utility types to generics-heavy library code and branded types.
Next.js
Building with Next.js daily at Vercel. Expert in App Router, server actions, ISR, middleware, and edge-runtime deployment strategies.
Tailwind CSS
Utility-first CSS for rapid prototyping and production builds. Experienced with custom design tokens, plugin authoring, and v4 migration.
Node.js
Server-side JavaScript for APIs, CLIs, and build tools. Proficient with Express, Fastify, tRPC, and serverless function architectures.
PostgreSQL
Relational database design, query optimization, and migrations. Experience with Prisma, Drizzle ORM, and raw SQL for complex analytics queries.
Selected work.
A few projects I'm especially proud of. Each one pushed me to solve hard problems in new ways.
E-commerce Platform
Led the frontend rebuild of a major e-commerce platform serving 2M+ monthly visitors. Implemented a headless architecture with Next.js, Shopify Storefront API, and a custom design system. Result: +180% conversion rate, 40% faster page loads, and a 95+ Lighthouse score across all pages. Tech: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Shopify.
Developer Tools Dashboard
Designed and built an internal analytics dashboard used by 50,000 developers daily. Features real-time data visualization, customizable widgets, and keyboard-driven navigation. Reduced mean time to debug by 60%. Recognized internally with an engineering excellence award. Tech: React, D3.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, PostgreSQL.
AI Writing Assistant
Co-founded and built the frontend for an AI writing tool that reached #1 on Product Hunt with 3,200+ upvotes. Implemented real-time collaborative editing, streaming AI responses, and a rich text editor with Markdown support. Grew to 25K monthly active users within three months of launch. Tech: React, Next.js, Tiptap, OpenAI API, Supabase.
Experience.
My professional journey in engineering, from startup energy to big-tech scale.
Senior Frontend Engineer — Vercel (2024 – Present)
Core contributor to the Next.js framework team. Leading the redesign of the Vercel dashboard component library. Shipped server components integration, improved build performance by 35%, and authored three RFCs adopted by the framework. Mentoring two junior engineers and driving frontend architecture decisions across the org.
Frontend Engineer — Stripe (2022 – 2024)
Built and maintained the merchant-facing dashboard serving 500K+ businesses. Owned the payments analytics module, reducing bundle size by 42% through code splitting and lazy loading. Collaborated with design to ship a fully accessible component library used by 12 product teams. Led the migration from Flow to TypeScript across 200+ components.
Junior Software Engineer — Google (2020 – 2022)
Started on the Google Cloud Console team building monitoring dashboards for enterprise customers. Progressed to owning the alerting configuration UI used by 100K+ projects. Gained expertise in large-scale design systems, accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA), and performance budgets. Promoted ahead of schedule after shipping a critical cost-analysis feature.
What people say.
Kind words from colleagues and managers I've had the pleasure of working with.
“Alex is one of those rare engineers who combines deep technical skill with genuine design sensibility. Every component he builds is performant, accessible, and a joy to use. He elevated our entire frontend architecture at Stripe and mentored half the team in the process.”
“Working with Alex on the AI Writing Assistant was a game-changer. He turned vague product ideas into polished, production-ready interfaces faster than anyone I've seen. His instinct for UX and his ability to ship under pressure is truly exceptional.”
“Alex joined my team as a junior and left as one of our strongest contributors. His growth was extraordinary — within a year he was owning critical features and confidently leading architecture reviews. Any team would be lucky to have him.”
Latest writing.
Thoughts on frontend engineering, design systems, and the ever-evolving web platform.
Building a Design System at Scale
Lessons learned from creating and maintaining a component library used by 12 product teams at Stripe. Covers token architecture, versioning strategy, and cross-team adoption. A deep dive into what works, what doesn't, and why governance matters more than code. 8 min read.
The Future of React Server Components
An exploration of how RSC changes the way we think about data fetching, bundle size, and component boundaries. Includes practical migration patterns and performance benchmarks from real production apps at Vercel. 5 min read.
Why TypeScript Changed My Career
From skeptic to evangelist: how adopting TypeScript transformed the way I design APIs, catch bugs before they ship, and collaborate with teams. Plus, advanced patterns like branded types and template literal types that I use daily. 6 min read.