// About Me

The Developer Behind the Code

Passionate about building software that makes a difference. Here's my journey so far.

Alex Chen

A bit about me

I'm a full-stack software engineer based in San Francisco with 5+ years of experience building products that scale. My journey started with tinkering on Linux systems as a teenager, and I've been hooked on building things ever since.

Currently, I focus on distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and developer tooling. I believe in writing clean, maintainable code and contributing back to the open source community.

When I'm not coding, you'll find me hiking trails, experimenting with mechanical keyboards, or diving into a good sci-fi novel.

☕
Daily Fuel
3 cups of coffee
🌍
Location
San Francisco, CA
💻
Setup
Neovim + tmux
🎵
Coding Playlist
Lo-fi hip hop
// Career Path

Experience Timeline

Jan 2024 — Present
Senior Software Engineer
NovaTech Inc.

Leading the platform engineering team building next-gen distributed infrastructure. Architected a service mesh handling 500K+ RPM with 99.99% uptime. Mentoring a team of 4 junior engineers.

Go Kubernetes gRPC Terraform Prometheus
Mar 2022 — Dec 2023
Software Engineer II
DataStream Labs

Built real-time analytics pipelines processing 1M+ events/day. Designed and implemented the customer-facing dashboard used by 200+ enterprise clients. Reduced query latency by 60%.

Python Apache Kafka React PostgreSQL Redis
Jun 2021 — Feb 2022
Full-Stack Developer
CreativeBox Agency

Developed web applications for 15+ clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Introduced TypeScript and automated testing, reducing production bugs by 40%.

TypeScript Next.js Node.js MongoDB AWS
Jan 2020 — May 2021
Junior Developer
StartupHQ

First engineering hire at an early-stage startup. Wore many hats — frontend, backend, DevOps. Built the MVP that secured the company's Series A funding round.

React Express.js Docker Firebase
// Education

Academic Background

🎓
B.S. Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley
2016 — 2020

Focus on distributed systems and algorithms. Dean's List 6 semesters. Teaching assistant for CS 162 (Operating Systems). Senior thesis on consensus algorithms in partitioned networks.

📚
Certifications
AWS & Google Cloud
2021 — 2024

AWS Solutions Architect Professional, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). Continuous learner with 50+ courses completed.

// Beyond Code

Interests & Hobbies

🏔 Hiking
⌨ Mechanical Keyboards
📚 Sci-Fi Novels
🎧 Music Production
📷 Photography
☕ Specialty Coffee
🎮 Indie Games
🚀 Space Tech
🤖 AI / ML Research
🌎 Open Source
📑 Tech Blogging
🏋 Rock Climbing