Alex Gunnarson

Hey! 👋🙂 I'm the (co-)founder and CTO of Deft (shopdeft.com), a search startup. For the last 10 years I've worked deeply on all parts of the stack. I have broad and deep knowledge of best engineering practices and am quick at careful problem solving. Here's a sample of where I might be especially helpful:

1️⃣ Backend languages

• Clojure — One of my superpowers. I've written possibly a million well-factored lines of production Clojure code.
• Java

2️⃣ Frontend languages

• ClojureScript — Built various complex apps in it. Relevant frameworks include Reagent, Re-frame, DataScript, etc.
• JavaScript

3️⃣ Infrastructure

• AWS — I've been working with it at scale and putting out fires in it for 5+ years. EC2, ECS, VPCs, SQS, etc.
• Terraform — I've set up and scaled multiple startups' complex infrastructure from scratch in it.

4️⃣ Systems architecture

• High-level system design
• Distributed systems — Microservices vs. monolith, CAP theorem, etc.
• Message queues — SQS, Kafka, etc.
• Relational DBs — Extensive experience with SingleStore/MemSQL, and some MySQL
• Graph DBs
• Triplestores — E.g. Datomic

5️⃣ UI + UX design
For an example of my design sense, check out my startup (Deft)'s landing page, shopdeft.com. Also check out a demo of Deft's beta product. My cofounder Zach presents it here starting at 0:16: shorturl.at/iIQ13 .

6️⃣ Bonus content

• Neural networks / ML / connectionist AI (high-level as well as implementational in TensorFlow)
• Symbolic AI
• Linguistics
• Formal logic
• Philosophy, especially metaphysics

I read >10 academic papers a week for fun :)