about me

Hello! My name is Alex Muench. I’m a software developer with over 12 years of professional experience. I grew up just outside of Chicago, and have been living in the city since 2013.

I have been tinkering with computers and programming since a child, and have been making websites since the days of Geocities. I’m also passionate about marine biology and the environment around us. I pursued both these topics in College, and graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a double major in Environmental Science and Computer Applications.

I’ve done the majority of my professional work in various agencies and consulting firms. I’ve done stints at Acquity Group, Accenture, and and Nerdery. This has allowed me to have a broad exposure to many different industries, projects, and techniques in my career.

I’ve also been heavily invested in the esports scene. From 2016-2018 I was involved with running the largest amateur Dota 2 leagues at the time. And though I eventually moved on, the experience of running teams and serving international groups of players was exciting and a massive learning experience.

After leaving EchoLeague, I spent several years at GGLeagues, a company focused on helping organization connect with their communities through esports, and operated in the CTO role. In this role I architected our web application, managed our devops, grew our tech and product teams, and worked to build a platform that helps bring esports to everyone.

When GGLeagues was shut down, I started at Strategypoint, where I helped a small team create Business Strategy Software that tried to make strategy simple and accessible for anyone! I joined as an experienced contributer, and helped modernize old systems and develop several new flagship features for the product, working directly with their CTO.

After Strategypoint, I briefly worked Carta Healthcare, where helped build and develop Carta’s internal software, which allowed the company to partner with healthcare organizations to streamline their clinical data collection, improving the quality of care given to patients! Before I left I lead a substantial effort to build an internal component library to modernize and streamline development.

Currently, I am at Engine, where I rejoined one of my GGLeagues co-founders as a Staff Front-End Engineer. I currently work on our Checkout Team, and have also lead a handful of company-wide initiatives, building an interal form-management library for our React applications and coordinating the client facing rebrand effort across our web and mobile apps as we transitioned from “Hotel Engine” to “Engine”.

While my career started primarily doing Front-End/UI Work, I have expanded my skillset over the last 12 years and am an experinced Full-Stack TypeScript/Javascript developer, with plenty of experience in both UI and Server-based work.

Outside of work, I maintain several open source libraries, a book review website called PageTern, and am working with a small team on a soon-to-be-released coffee brewing app for native mobile devices.

When I’m not working on software development, I’ve taken an interest in birding and bird photography. You can see my photography and progress over on eBird!. My partner and I have a dog and two cats that always keep us busy, and I’m also an avid World of Warcraft raider, and have been raid leading my guild for the past 4 years!

skills

Proficient with Javascript, Typescript (Both on Front-End and Back-End)
Proficient with HTML, CSS, Sass/Less/Scss, TailwindCSS
Proficient in Angular Framework architecture and development
Proficient in Nuxt architecture and development
Proficient in React and React Native architecture and development
Experienced in NextJS architecture and development
Experienced in Linux systems administration
Experienced in GCP, Digital Ocean, Linode devops
Experienced in setup of Continuous Integration services
Some experience with golang, Godot, C#, Kotlin, Python, ElectronJS
Some experience with AWS devops