I'm Alex Chen.
I write about building
things that last.
Staff Engineer by day, writer by evening. I've spent the last decade shipping software at companies like Stripe, building teams, and trying to understand what separates good engineering from great engineering.
My Story
I started writing code at 16, driven by the peculiar joy of making computers do exactly what I wanted. I studied Computer Science at UC Berkeley, mostly because I couldn't think of anything else I'd rather spend four years doing, and stumbled into the industry during a time when "senior engineer" meant something very different from what it does today.
My career took me through early-stage startups, a near-catastrophic infrastructure migration that taught me more than any book ever could, and eventually to Stripe, where I spent five transformative years working on payment infrastructure that processed billions of dollars daily. The scale was humbling. The quality bar was relentless. I grew more there than in the first eight years combined.
"The most valuable thing I've learned is that software engineering is fundamentally a people problem wearing a technical disguise."
I started this blog in 2020, initially as a way to process my own thinking. I wrote about things I was struggling with — how to do code review well, how to think about system design, what it means to be a senior engineer when the title starts feeling hollow. I never expected anyone to read it.
Today I'm at a stealth-stage company working on infrastructure tooling. I write here in the evenings, usually with a cup of tea and a dog at my feet, trying to articulate something true about the craft.
The Journey
Building developer infrastructure tooling at a company rethinking how teams ship software. Early-stage, high-ownership, deeply technical work.
Five years working on systems that make money move reliably. Led migration of legacy payment routing to a distributed architecture handling 10M+ transactions/day. Promoted to Staff in 2024. Mentored 12 engineers to promotion.
Joined as employee ~80, worked on multiplayer infrastructure and the real-time collaboration engine. Watched the company scale from scrappy startup to industry-defining product.
First real job. Joined as a junior engineer, grew to lead a team of 4. Survived a Series A, a product pivot, and an infrastructure incident that aged me five years in one weekend. Invaluable.
Concentrated in systems and theory. TAed for CS 61A for three semesters, which turned out to be more formative than most of my actual coursework.
Areas of Depth
Consistency models, consensus, fault tolerance. Ten years of making things work at scale.
Translating ambiguous requirements into coherent architectures. Strong opinions, loosely held.
Growing engineers, running effective teams, making hard decisions with incomplete information.
Making complex ideas legible. Design docs, RFCs, and essays people actually finish reading.
Payments background means hard thinking about correctness, auditability, and failure modes.
Internal tooling, local dev, CI/CD, and the unglamorous infrastructure that makes teams fast.