Alexander Petros

Welcome to my home page on the World Wide Web! It can always be found at alexanderpetros.com.

The road to success is always under construction; this little garden of a web page is too 👷🏗️

A photo of Alex Petros, wearing jeans and a white tshirt, watering plants in the foreground. To his left is a tall wooden fence.

The 24601 (Who am I?)

I'm Alexander Petros. I'm a writer, software engineer, and artist living in New York City. I'm originally from Miami, Florida.

My Websites

Much of the work that I'm doing now can by found on my other websites:

Unplanned Obsolescence: My blog about writing software that doesn't rot
The Floating Continent: My blog about software, for the people that software happens to
We Make Internet: Art project with my friend Morry

I've also written for htmx.org and The Washington Post Engineering Blog.

Selected Works

Here's a couple recent works that I'm proud of:

Ouroboros of Bullshit: Are you sure LLMs aren't eating their own tail?
Behavior belongs in the HTML: It was always meant to be functional
The Easiest Moment in Human History to Plan a Party: The difference between social networks and social media
Non-deterministic Model With a Gun: Robot AI performance art / digital circuitry
Why htmx Doesn't Have a Build Step: How to do less with less

See the complete works page for more.

In The Press

"DOC Goes Digital: A Look Into the Impact of Trailhead", The Dartmouth, April 17, 2024
"This AI clone of Reddit’s Am I The Asshole forum will give you the best bad advice", The Verge, April 20, 2022

Career

Recurse Center, Spring 2024 Retreat Member

I am doing a 3-month programming retreat at the Recurse Center! It's a tremendous group of thoughtful, smart people all working on interesting projects. I'm working on an open-source ActivityPub implementation that's really easy to self-host.

htmx, Core Maintainer

Core maintainer and occasional blogger for the htmx JavaScript Library. The hypermedia concepts revitalized by htmx are going to reinvent web development for the next decade. I do not get paid.

Freelance Software Consulting, Self-employed

I build software infrastructure for non-software companies, with architectures that can last for years with very little maintenance. You can hire me to do this for you too.

Dartmouth College, Web Administrator

I rebuilt the Outdoor Programs registration stack from scratch (with htmx, to really test out its capabilities) and I now maintain it. This was an unmitigated success, in that it is reliable, cheap, and runs with with virtually no maintenance. I also help them out with other minor web projects related to the First Year Trips program.

Past

The Washington Post, Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer → Engineering Lead

I was responsible for the software platform that powers The Post's freelancing operations, which I took over when it crashed. I rebuilt the entire deployment stack and got the system to a stable state. In my capacity as an Engineering Lead, I was in charge of both engineering direction and product management, working with multiple department stakeholders to coordinate and prioritize our very limited resources. I managed one (1) person.

Amazon, SDE Intern → SDE I → SDE II.

I was on the Alexa Video Multimodal team, which was responsible for video playback on the Echo Show family of devices. I worked on improving the service's performance under peak load, and designed partner-facing APIs.

Stealth Startup, Software Engineer

I quit after three months because I did not like it.

The Socials

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @goodtweetsalex
Mastodon: @[email protected]
GitHub: @alexpetros
LinkedIn: /apetros
Instagram: @alexwpetros
Threads: @alexwpetros