alex@dev: ~/portfolio — zsh — 132×38
portfolio ~/oss ~/blog
alex@dev:~$ cat intro.md
// last login: Fri Jun 27 09:14:22 on ttys001

> Alex Chen

~/ Senior Software Engineer based in Singapore, building distributed systems, developer tooling, and the occasional WebGL side-quest. Currently shaping the platform team at Northwind Labs. I care about observability, type safety, and code that survives the third refactor.

type a command to navigate — or scroll
ls ~/skills git log --projects cat experience.log gh activity --year gh pr list --merged ls ~/blog/*.md echo "hello" | mail alex
9+
Years shipping
187k+
Lines merged
42
OSS PRs merged
3.2k
GitHub followers

42 function getSkills(developer) // Technical Arsenal
DEV
STACK
TypeScript
Rust
Go
Python
React
Next.js
Node
Postgres
Docker
K8s
Terraform
gRPC
TypeScript // type-safe everything
95%
Rust // systems & CLI tools
90%
Go // services & networking
85%
Distributed Systems // CRDTs, queues, consensus
92%
PostgreSQL & Indexing // EXPLAIN ANALYZE enjoyer
88%
Kubernetes & Platform Eng // gitops, controllers
82%

87 async function listProjects() // featured work
commit a3f9c21

forge-cli

★ 4.2k MIT · TypeScript

A 12ms cold-start build tool that incrementally compiles monorepos with content-addressed caching. Replaced Webpack for three internal teams and cut CI time by 64%.

Rust WASM napi-rs esbuild
2024 — present · maintainer view_source →
commit 7e1b8d4

ledger-sync

★ 1.8k Apache-2.0 · Go

A conflict-free replicated ledger for multi-region financial workloads. Uses Raft consensus and CRDT merges to guarantee exactly-once settlement across 3 continents.

Go Raft Postgres gRPC
2023 — present · co-maintainer view_source →
commit c2d4e91

obsrv

★ 980 MIT · TypeScript

A self-hosted observability stack — traces, metrics, and logs in a single 8MB binary. Powers incident response for 14 production services at Northwind Labs.

TypeScript ClickHouse OpenTelemetry
2024 · side project view_source →
commit f5a8c33

type-pirate

★ 2.6k MIT · TypeScript

A TypeScript LSP plugin that flags unsafe `any` escapes in real time. Adopted by 6 internal codebases; caught 1,400+ type regressions before they shipped.

TypeScript LSP Tree-sitter
2023 — 2024 · archived view_source →

134 function gitLogCareer() // --since=2017
9f2a4e1
Alex Chen <alex@northwind.dev> 2023 — present
feat: Senior Software Engineer · Northwind Labs
Lead the platform reliability team (4 engineers). Shipped a multi-region service mesh, cut p99 latency from 480ms → 92ms, and authored the RFC process now used company-wide. Mentor two junior engineers through their first on-call rotations.
platform/mesh.go +8.4k −1.2k rfc/0007-process.md +420 observability/* +3.1k
4c8b2d7
Alex Chen <alex@vertex.io> 2020 — 2023
feat: Software Engineer → Engineer II · Vertex IO
Backend on the billing platform. Migrated a 1.2M-LOC PHP monolith to a typed Go service architecture without downtime. Owned the queue subsystem that processes 40M+ events/day.
billing/service.go +12k queue/kafka.go +4.8k −900 migration/* +22k
1a7f3e5
Alex Chen <alex@kestrel.dev> 2017 — 2020
feat: Junior Developer · Kestrel Studio
Full-stack on a B2B SaaS. Shipped the first design-system, introduced TypeScript, and led the migration off Heroku to AWS ECS. Wrote my first open-source PR here.
design-system/* +6.4k infra/ecs.tf +1.2k tsconfig.json +88

178 const activity = await ghActivity() // last 52 weeks
Contribution Activity // public + private reviewed
1,847contributions in the last year
Less
More

221 async function mergedPRs() // upstream contributions
denoland/deno
Fix op-layer race in fs watcher #21482

Closed a 6-month-old race condition where inotify events could fire before the watcher's internal state was committed. Added a regression test.

● merged+812 ⭐
rust-lang/cargo
Resolve workspace inheritance for dev-deps #12940

Dev-dependencies were silently ignored when inheriting from `[workspace.dependencies]`. Patched resolver and updated docs.

● merged+1.2k ⭐
vercel/next.js
Cache invalidation for app-router fetch hooks #58117

Tag-based invalidation was missing revalidate-time fallback. Added a unit test covering 4 edge cases and shipped the fix.

● merged+2.4k ⭐

263 const essays = await readDir('~/blog') // long-form notes

301 function contact(message) // I read every one

Open to senior/staff engineering roles, contract architecture work, and advisory engagements on developer tooling and distributed systems. I respond within 48 hours, weekends excluded.

email: alex@chen.dev
location: Singapore · GMT+8 · remote-friendly
response: ≤ 48h, Mon–Fri
available for Q3 2026 — limited bandwidth
alex@dev: ~/contact — compose message
message sent — thanks, I'll reply within 48h.