Alex Kahn
Senior Software Engineer II at honeycomb.io
Northampton, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Kahn is a Senior Software Engineer II with 17 years of experience building data-intensive, high-throughput systems across non-profits, B2C products, and B2B SaaS. He specializes in backend, streaming data, and distributed systems, having driven zero-downtime migrations, ClickHouse-based performance wins, and scalable secret storage for millions of sites. A quiet, pragmatic team lead, he breaks complex projects into actionable work, mentors junior engineers, and pushes cultural change around reliability and observability. His open-source contributions include improving robustness and error reporting in high-performance Ruby clients like Dalli, reflecting a focus on operational clarity as much as speed. Based in Northampton, MA, he pairs rigorous technical design with a knack for asking the tough questions—and doing so with humor and care for colleagues and the bottom line.
17 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree Social Thought and Political Economy, Bachelor's Degree Social Thought and Political Economy at University of Massachusetts AmherstHigh School, High School at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School
English, Spanish
Github Skills (5)
logging10
error-handling10
memcached10
ruby10
system-design9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
petergoldstein/dalli
Jun 2013 - Jun 2013
High performance memcached client for Ruby
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:Alex focused on improving the logging and error handling within the Dalli memcached client. Their contributions involved enhancing the logging of server failures, including detailed exception information. They also implemented state verification to prevent errors, making the failure descriptions more informative and robust. Additionally, the user streamlined the error reporting by removing unnecessary backtraces and adjusting the arguments passed to the failure function.
memcachedruby
appoptics/appoptics-services
Mar 2018 - Nov 2020
Contributions:2 reviews, 5 PRs, 10 pushes in 2 years 9 months
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