About The Author

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. At the time of writing I’m twenty-five. I’ve lived in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood since mid-2007. Previously, I lived for most of my life around Washington, DC, particularly in Bethesda, Maryland.

I currently work for Twitter, Inc., a communications service that allows users to send short one-to-many messages via a variety of media. My title at Twitter is API Lead; my daily work is growing and supporting a collection of services on which other developers can build. I’ve been working at Twitter since the beginning of 2007, several months before the service began to grow in popularity. Working at Twitter has been an education in scaling, performance optimization, and systems architecture.

Before working at Twitter I’ve done information security work for a military and intelligence contractor, helped build web applications for political campaigns and non-profits, and more. As you might guess, my professional expertise has been in web application development and computer security. I’ve been working in technology since before I was old enough to legally hold a work permit; my first internship was at age twelve.

As a sort of work-related hobby I study the design and implementation of programming languages comparatively. This hobby has lately turned into a side-project, as I’m co-authoring a book on the Scala programming language for O’Reilly, due in mid-2009. I also do a fair bit of speaking on technical topics I’m interested in.

Technology aside, my main interests are music, food & drink, and culture. I DJ an eclectic mix of musical styles with a friend whenever we get the chance. I’m a fan of good beer, cocktails, spirits, and short-pull espresso. I enjoy cooking and sampling the wide world of culinary options. In my free time I frequent museums and theater, and I try to keep up on novels and films. I enjoy cultural criticism, and I maintain an online scrapbook of minimalist art, design, architecture, and technology.

In terms of social ideology, I identify as a secular humanist. 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.

About This Site

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. Of all the free blogging software I’ve used, I’ve been most satisfied with Blogger.

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, the revision 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.

Elsewhere

You can find me on a variety of social web sites; my username is usually “al3x”. Alphabetically:

• Dopplr — travels.
• Flickr — miserable attempts at photography.
• GitHub — code, waiting for you to improve it.
• I Use This — the Mac OS X software I use.
• Last.fm — the music I listen to.
• LinkedIn — all business.
• SlideShare — presentations.
• Twitter — brief status updates and observations.

I also contribute to the following other weblogs and sites:

• Beers, beers, beers — beer reviews.
• Graceless Failures — Scala tips and tricks.
• Minima — a record of applied simplicity.

Feel free to email me at al3x@al3x.net.