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.

My career began doing work with various agencies and consulting firms including Acquity Group, Accenture, and and Nerdery. This gave me a broad exposure to many different industries, projects, and techniques in my career. I even spent some time building the Search Results Page and doing some platform work at Walmart.com while I was with Accenture!

I’ve also been heavily invested in the esports scene. From 2016-2018 I built a software platform and started running the largest amateur Dota 2 league at the time, with over 2500 players across 3 continents. And though I eventually moved on, the experience of running teams and serving international groups of players was exciting and a massive learning experience.

As I moved on from EchoLeague, I helped found GGLeagues, a startup focused on helping local organizations (like park districts and community centers) connect with their communities through esports, where I as the CTO. 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. It was an incredible experienc where I had opportunities to work in both the tech and business sides of the company, and I learned an incredible amount in the 3+ years I spent working at the company.

After we closed down GGLeagues, I had the startup-bug and joined a few other early stage startups as a staff software engineer before landing at Engine, where I rejoined one of my GGLeagues co-founders as a Staff Front-End Engineer. I currently work on our Lodging Checkout & Postbooking team maintaining our web, mobile-web, and native-mobile applications, have lead several company-wide initiatives (including a full company rebrand), and maintain several internal tools & libraries—including a React form library and an email templating and generation tool.

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 NodeJS architecture and development
Proficient in Nuxt architecture and development
Proficient in React architecture and development
Proficient in React Native architecture and development
Proficient in Vue architecture and development
Experienced in Astro 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