Alexander Dean
CEO & Co-Founder at Snowplow Analytics
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlexander Dean is a seasoned technology entrepreneur and CEO with 15 years of experience building and scaling data infrastructure, best known as co-founder and current CEO of Snowplow, a Commercial Open Source vendor for real-time behavioral event data. He moved from hands-on Head of Technology—where he coded core pipeline components and contributed to the JavaScript tracker and referrer-parser libraries—to leading the company’s expansion, product strategy and fundraising across the US and Europe. A pragmatic full-stack engineer with strong backend and DevOps chops, he has contributed to notable open-source projects (including work touching Twitter’s Scalding) that reveal a deep interest in reliable data processing and attribution. Based in London, he combines product-minded leadership with developer empathy and a penchant for solving the messy plumbing that makes analytics trustworthy and auditable.
15 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
BA History, BA History at University of CambridgeSt Pauls School, Barnes, London
English, German
Stackoverflow
15,775reputation
4.0mreached
53answers
52questions
encoding
top-5%
json
top-1%
sbt
top-5%
versioning
top-5%
scala
top-5%
java
top-5%
Github Skills (35)
json10
git10
javascript10
cascading10
testing10
bash10
web-analytics10
scala10
front-end-development10
yaml10
version-control10
json-serialization10
reflection9
java9
ruby9
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
snowplow-referer-parser/referer-parser
Oct 2012 - Jun 2017
Library for extracting marketing attribution data from referrer URLs
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:5 releases, 285 commits, 15 PRs in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Alexander primarily contributed to the project by developing and maintaining a shell script (`sync_yaml.sh`) to synchronize YAML files across various sub-folders. They also modified the Ruby code, specifically, the `search_engine_lookup.rb` and `referrer.rb` files, suggesting back-end logic development. Furthermore, the user was involved in updates related to the build process, like updating the sync script, adding tests, and restructuring code.
referrerurlspythonattributiondata-extraction
snowplow/snowplow-javascript-tracker
Jun 2012 - Dec 2016
Snowplow event tracker for client-side and server-side JavaScript. Add analytics to your websites, web apps and servers.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 258 commits, 11 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Alexander primarily worked on enhancing and refactoring the JavaScript tracker. Their contributions included renaming folders, implementing new functionality for setting site IDs, and adding features like document character set and timezone tracking. Further, they contributed to refactoring event handling and adding the capability of adding a business defined unique id to events, alongside standard code improvements.
snowplow-javascript-trackeranalyticstrackerclient-sidesnowplowanalytics
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