Hey! I’m Alex.
I am a Lead Platform Engineer at Stitch Fix, and for the past 6 years, I have focused on Fraud, Payments, and Data Privacy.
I spent my first 5 years at Stitch Fix helping build a Fraud team from scratch. Today, I’m focused on desiging the company’s longterm fraud prevention ambitions and roadmap.
The kind of work I like to do
I like working directly on solving business problems. I spend much of my time collaborating with business partners and teams to define the business problem, and working then to define and implement the right solution.
When designing a solution, I look at how we can receive immediate feedback in the process by:
- Planning collaboratively and allowing input early
- Providing clear tests in my code
- Ensuring my code is observable in production with logging, metrics, and tracing
- Providing code that is testable in production through feature flags and experiments
I enjoy spending a lot of time understanding my team’s domain in Datadog, Looker and in our data warehose writing queries.
If you think I’m a good fit for a role, you can find me on LinkedIn or on Github.
Talks
RailsConf 2020 - Rebuilding ActionController
If you replaced ActionController with an implementation of your own, what would you have to build to get your app working again? This talk does just that, going through how the controller interacts with the router to receive a request, process it, and return a response.
It also goes over rebuilding controller features like Params, Controller Callbacks, and Rendering.
RailsConf 2017 - Perusing the Rails Source Code
This talk outlines steps you can take to explore the inner workings of Rails and gain context on its design. Understanding how Rails works will allow you to write better Rails applications and better Ruby code.
Blog format: Perusing the Rails Source Code
On my own time
In my spare time, I love learning Italian and linguistics (and all of my linguistics books are in Italian, double whammy!). I’ve even found a way to mix in my programmings skills into it.
Enter Allora: My writing app
In 2022, I had an itch I wanted to scratch: I wanted to write more in Italian. I wanted an app to help me write daily in Italian with interesting topics to write about, so I built my own. It solved my problem well and these days, I write 100-200 words in Italian daily.
I built it using Heroku and Rails with a bit of React.
