Alex Chaffee
Owner at Citizen Code
Burlington, Vermont, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Chaffee is a veteran software engineer and founder with 24 years of experience building web and developer tooling from Burlington, VT. As owner of Purple Technology and a long-time consultant at Citizen Code, he blends hands-on Rails and JavaScript engineering with coaching, teaching, and UX-driven development. He’s an active open-source contributor with notable work on core Ruby tooling—improving RubyGems installation and JRuby compatibility—and on high-profile projects like freeCodeCamp and RSpec where he strengthened testing and curriculum tooling. A former Pivotal Labs “Mad Scientist” and CTO of Burlington Code Academy, he pairs systems-level thinking with classroom-tested teaching methods. Colleagues know him for rapid, pragmatic coding (he jokes about “coding like a banshee”) and for creating reliable developer workflows such as his rerun file-watcher.
24 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
BS Cognitive Psychology, BS Cognitive Psychology at Reed CollegeBHS
Stackoverflow
8,182reputation
1.7mreached
87answers
8questions
sql
top-5%
docker-compose
top-5%
ruby
top-5%
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
activerecord
top-5%
couchdb
top-5%
Github Skills (41)
ruby-rails10
javascript10
camp10
testing10
css10
rspec10
rails10
os-development10
filesystemwatcher10
learnr10
ruby10
osdev10
autocode10
thread10
bootcamp10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
alexch/rerun
Jun 2009 - Jan 2023
Restarts an app when the filesystem changes. Uses growl and FSEventStream if on OS X.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:201 commits, 29 PRs, 54 pushes in 13 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Alex was the primary contributor to the `rerun` project, focusing on the core functionality of restarting an application when the file system changes. They developed a `FileSystemWatcher` class and a `Listener` class that uses OS X's FSEventStream framework for file system monitoring. They also implemented a `Runner` class, which handles the launching, restarting, and stopping of the application. Furthermore, the user refactored and refocused on Listen gem.
filesystem
alexch/learn_ruby
Nov 2010 - Aug 2014
a basic ruby class generated from test-first-teaching
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:48 commits, 1 comment in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Alex appears to be working on a Ruby-based learning project, contributing primarily to front-end development. Their commits primarily involve generating HTML and HTML modifications. This suggests they are involved in creating or updating the course content with a focus on layout and content presentation. The generated code primarily focuses on restructuring the navigation, page layout and content, along with CSS styles and HTML formatting.
ruby
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