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About |
My full name is Alexander Francis Payne. I go by Alex. I’ve used the handle “al3x” for over ten years around the Internet, where I’m now perhaps better recognized by it. I’m 27. I live in Portland, Oregon. Before that, I lived in San Francisco. I grew up around Washington, DC.
In May, 2010 I joined Simple as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. We’re building the future of personal finance, starting with a fee-free, customer-friendly, beautifully designed online banking service.
Previously, I worked as an engineer for Twitter, Inc., a communications system that allows users to send short one-to-many messages. I joined Twitter as one of its first employees at the beginning of 2007, several months before the service began to grow in popularity. It was an education in scaling, optimization, and systems architecture, not to mention all the joys and stresses that come with working at a growing startup. I worked primarily on building Twitter’s developer platform, and later on the service’s core infrastructure.
Before Twitter I worked in information security for a military and intelligence contractor, built web applications for political campaigns and non-profits, and did a smattering of other freelance programming and graphic design jobs. I’ve been working in technology since before I was old enough to legally hold a work permit. I was twelve when I did my first software development internship.
I do a fair bit of speaking on technical topics I’m interested in. Additionally, as a work-related hobby I study the design and implementation of programming languages. This hobby turned into a side-project in the form of Programming Scala, co-authored with Dean Wampler and published by O’Reilly Media in September 2009. Though the book was a lot of work, I’m eager for my next large writing project.
Technology aside, my interests are music, food & drink, and culture. I adore craft beer, inventive cocktails, bracing spirits, and a good espresso. I enjoy cooking and cuisine. In my free time I frequent museums and theater, and I try to keep up on books and films. For a time, I maintained a popular online scrapbook of minimalist art, design, architecture, and technology.
In terms of social ideology, I identify as a secular humanist. On matters of faith, I’m an agnostic. Politically, I’m a registered independent; my politics are closest to that of The Economist newspaper: mildly Libertarian, fiscally conservative, socially liberal where it’s practical and pragmatic, cautiously globalist.
I write here. I write on no particular schedule and about no definite range of topics. My posts range in length from a single sentence to several printed pages. More often than not, I write about technology, culture, music, travel, and ideas, punctuated with accounts of major goings-on in my life.
This site has gone through many iterations over the years. Before its incarnation as a weblog, al3x.net was a portfolio for my early attempts at web and graphic design, maintained by hand and updated via FTP. I eventually migrated the site to an early version of Blogger and began updating more frequently.
In 2002 I redesigned the site as a blog, powered by an early version of Blosxom running on my university’s servers. Subsequently, I’ve tried just about every major blogging software package out there and written my own in various languages and frameworks. There’s no practical reason for switching blogging software so often, save that it makes for enjoyable tinkering.
I currently host this weblog on GitHub using their Pages feature and Jekyll static site generation system. This lets me completely customize the layout and design of the site, edit posts in my text editor of choice, and store everything in Git, a version control system I trust. I outsource email and instant messaging for the domain to Google Apps.
I subsidize the hosting costs of this site by placing ads on the front page and beside individual posts. Currently, those ads are provided by the good people at Fusion Ads.
You can find me on a variety of social web sites; my username is usually “al3x”. Alphabetically:
- GitHub — code, waiting for you to improve it.
- Last.fm — the music I listen to.
- LinkedIn — all business.
- Pinboard — bookmarks.
- SlideShare — presentations.
- Twitter — brief status updates and observations.
I also maintain(ed) the following other weblogs and sites:
- Graceless Failures — tips and tricks for the Scala programming language.
- Minima — a record of applied simplicity; no longer updated.
Feel free to email me. For anything work-related, use [email protected]. For everything else, please write [email protected].