Alex Chen
Systems Engineer & Open Source Contributor
I build reliable infrastructure and developer tools. Currently working on distributed systems at Arcway Labs. Based in Portland, OR.
About
I've spent the last eight years designing backend systems that handle high-throughput workloads without falling over at 3 AM. Most of my work involves Rust and Go, building the kind of plumbing that nobody thinks about until it breaks - message brokers, caching layers, observability pipelines. Before Arcway I was at Conduit Systems, where I helped migrate a monolith to a service mesh processing 2M+ requests per second. I contribute to several open source projects and maintain a few of my own. I believe good infrastructure should be boring.
Projects
vex
RUST
A fast, ergonomic CLI framework for building terminal applications. Declarative argument parsing, built-in help generation, and shell completions out of the box.
scattercache
GO
Distributed in-memory cache with consistent hashing and automatic rebalancing. Designed for multi-region deployments where latency matters more than perfect consistency.
termframe
RUST
A terminal UI framework built on top of crossterm. Component-based architecture, reactive state management, and a layout engine inspired by flexbox.
logmux
PYTHON
Lightweight log aggregator that collects, filters, and routes structured logs from multiple services. Supports stdout, file, and syslog inputs with S3 and ClickHouse sinks.
Writing
- Why I Stopped Using ORMs
- - After years of fighting query builders, I went back to raw SQL with a thin type-safe layer. Here's what I learned.
- Consistent Hashing in Practice
- - The theory is simple. The production edge cases are not. Notes from building scattercache's rebalancing algorithm.
- Structured Logging Is Not Enough
- - Structured logs solved the parsing problem but created a cardinality problem. How we tamed our observability costs.
- Building a Terminal UI Framework from Scratch
- - What happens when you try to bring React's component model to the terminal. Spoiler: layout is the hard part.
Contact
Best way to reach me is email. I also exist on a few other corners of the internet.