Hi, my name is Alex

/me

I don’t have a degree in CS and never took a class on it. In fact, I hold degrees in history and political science, but I’ve never worked in the field.
I started programming in the late 2000s, mostly because I was annoyed with the degree of digitalization in my field or the lack thereof. My first project was a small website where I kept texts my professors handed out. They scanned articles and essays, mailed them to a copy shop and us students had to go to the copy shop to get a print-out of the few hundred pages. This was mandatory in most of my lectures. I took these texts and uploaded them to a WordPress installation and used OCR to turn them back into text and make them somewhat searchable. While I was writing my master’s thesis, I added some sort of API between this website and LaTeX to quickly get the references into my bibliography.
After working in different positions in online agencies, I started freelancing full-time in early 2016. I’ve been working in web development for over ten years, yet, consider myself a naïve programmer.

/now

ResizeFly

My dynamic image-resizing/-optimization solution ResizeFly is still in the back of my head as a standalone product. The base plugin and some add-ons are used in production on several sites I have built for clients already, with hundreds of thousands image requests every month. The next steps will be to figure out if there is a niche for this in WordPress as more and more hosting providers ship image optimization, how to structure the plugin (one pro plugin vs a freemium model), if I can get away with only with only maintaining actively supported PHP versions and of course pricing.

WordPress libraries

Over the past years I’ve put common and recurring functionality in libraries for WordPress of which the assets handling and the template loader are my favorites to work on.