About · New York City
About.
Software engineer, more than half a decade shipping product. These days I help engineering teams make AI adoption actually stick.

- BORN
- New York City
- WATCHES
- Game of Thrones · Sons of Anarchy · Robot Chicken
- LISTENS
- DJ Heartstring · SWIM · Chet Baker
Alex Tong.
Software engineer in New York City, twelve hours a day with
. Previously at
, where I learned what scale costs in sleep, then
, building the paywalls and registration walls that decide when to stop a reader, and what they see when we do.
Toward the end of my time at The New York Times I went deep on AI tooling. I joined the AI Champions team that rolled Claude Code out across the roughly 500-engineer org and taught it to build with agents, delivered three presentations during the rollout, including a CLAUDE.md talk at the company's internal EngX conference, and shipped plugins the company adopted as the second-most-prolific contributor to our internal Claude Code plugin marketplace. On my own team, the Access team behind the paywalls and registration walls, I wrote the AI-assisted migration script that turned a year-plus migration into a few months of work. That work became the practice: I now run AI-native engineering enablement for engineering teams.
I write a monthly dispatch about AI tooling, music production, and side projects. Before coding I sold product for Apple, then high-end real estate in New York City. Both came down to reading what someone actually needs before they can name it, which is the instinct I build with now. I cook. I record. I'm building a small video game.
01 · The path here
Where the playbook was earned.
- nowIndependentNew York
Running an AI-native engineering enablement practice: a fix-diagnostic ROI readout, a delivery accelerator, and CLAUDE.md workshops for engineering teams.
- 2023–26
New YorkBuilt the paywalls and registration walls: deciding when to stop a reader, and what they see when we do. Briefly, the video and audio players too.
- 2021–23
New YorkTwo years of scale. Learned what production really costs. Started writing every Tuesday.
- 2020App AcademyNew York
Twelve weeks, head-down. The first commit, the first deploy, the habit that stuck.
02 · Contact
Want to talk?
Email is fastest. I reply within one business day.
There are two of us at this address. The other one only comes out at night. Enter the castle
