Watch on YouTube
Selected client work
mostly mellow
A custom brand site for a private New York café, with story and experience pages, an inquiry flow, and a members' page behind an access phrase.
Selected work & experiments
Ideas,
made real.
Client websites, professional work, and independent projects. Explore what I built and the contributions behind it.
Explore the work Previously at Amazon and The New York Times · Based in New York
Client work
From the first brief to launch“Pairs a strategic business and design perspective with flawless execution.”
Lindsey LeeOwner · Mostly Mellow
Read Lindsey’s recommendation 01 / Professional work
Before going independent
Full-Stack Software Engineer
2023–2026
The New York TimesPaywalls &
subscriber access
News paywall
My work focused on the backend logic that decides when readers see a paywall or registration prompt.
- Implemented and maintained the access rules behind the news reading experience.
- Refactored legacy rules and documented their behavior, so product, engineering, and QA had one source of truth.
- Wrote the access rules that put the Watch tab, The New York Times’ video feed on web and in the apps, behind subscription friction at launch.
- Integrated the Statsig experimentation platform into the access rules, with a matcher, overrides, and internal-traffic gating, so paywall experiments could run.
- Found and closed a paywall bypass in the bot detection, and hardened how crawlers are verified.
Spelling Bee
I migrated the frontend components into the shared paywall repository and built the backend logic that selects offers and handles subscriber access.
- Led the migration across web and apps, so the team could test and personalize subscription offers.
- Built support for subscribers who had paid but never created an account, a capability future Games paywall migrations could reuse.
“I truly think this capability would not exist without Alex.”
Nicole LarsonSenior Product Manager · The New York Times
Read Nicole’s recommendation 
Games end screens
The screen after a finished puzzle is where Games asks players to sign up or subscribe. I moved it for four games onto the shared messaging platform.
- Ported the end-screen actions for Connections, the Mini, the Daily Crossword, and Sudoku into one selection framework, so a single experiment can run across every game.
- Wrote the porting runbook and the load-testing guide the team used for later game ports.
The Athletic
The first full subscriber-access integration for a newly acquired product. I was the primary engineer bringing The Athletic onto The New York Times’ access platform.
- Implemented the base access rules and built the mobile paywalls and registration walls to the design specs.
- Led the follow-on machine-learning integration for subscription growth, delivered ahead of schedule.
Back-end Software Development Engineer I
2021–2023
Alexa News monetization
At Amazon, I worked on monetizing Alexa News, building systems that supported advertising, monitoring, and reporting for news partners.
- Designed and built an AWS monitoring platform that replaced manual investigations with dashboards and alerts.
- Extended the platform into reporting for news partners, working across teams to define and deliver the data they needed.
02 / Independent projects
Useful tools.
A little curiosity.
Apps and personal projects, built with room to experiment.
03 / Early experiments
Learning by making.
Early projects and weekend builds, with live demos and selected public source code.
noteworthy
A full-stack notes app with rich-text editing. Built to learn, and still in occasional use.
the maze
Generate a maze and compare three pathfinding algorithms. A graph-search visualizer built with Canvas.
What should we make next?
Start a projectTell me what you need built. We’ll start with a free scoping call and a flat quote.