Alexa Drake

Biography

She writes, and sometimes performs, music under the alias leila phelps. She also wrote and performed with Dumpster Dick and Seafoam in my Swimsuit

Alexa is, slowly, working on a video game, which she sometimes writes about.

Occasionally, she builds furniture, and even more occasionally writes about it.

Alexa works on BeautifulSun, a mobile-app that uses weather data to predict the relative beauty of future sunrises and sunsets. It can be downloaded here for android devices, and will be available via the apple-store eventually.

From time to time, she writes refrigerator-poetry.

note: this website is entirely html & css, but is still modestly interactive. For example, hover over a job-title under the Employment history section. Want to see how it's done? check out the code.

Employment history

Founding Engineer, Speakeasy Development June 2022 through August 2023 Lead/owned/designed/developed infrastructure (terraform, helm), frontend (ts, car, next.js), and backend (go), library (java, golang), code-generation (go, ts, python, c#, ruby, rust, java) features for core product. Owned relationships with customers.
DevOps Engineer, New York Public Radio January 2022 through June 2022 Worked with data/analytics team to support their data/infrastructure needs (AWS Redshift as well as a few FTP/AWS lambda/etc pipelines). Released and maintained AWS infrastructure for software products using terraform; built and maintained ci/cd pipelines; reviewed code; updated legacy systems & mitigated dependency hell; promoted code & infrastructure hygiene & best-practices.
Lead Software Engineer, QBE August 2020 through October 2021 Designed/managed (worked with business stakeholders to coordinate requirements, timelines, etc.), architected (designed, deployed, and maintained infrastructure and cloud resources using Azure cloud based on the stakeholder needs), developed (.net core & TS/React), deployed (ci/cd, etc.), and maintained (bug/feature triage & implementation, etc.) fullstack applications.
Technical Lead, Nvisia July 2019 through August 2020 Designed, developed, deploy, and maintained back-end services, including critical parts of the CCPA-compliance implementation. Maintained and built data-models, ETL pipelines, and other data-oriented duties.
Backend Developer, Fetch Rewards January 2019 through June 2019 Developed and maintained back-end services.
Senior Developer, QBE May 2016 through May 2018 Lead small teams; mentored more junior developers; designed & developed fullstack applications around experimental technology (IoT, blockchain, various AI models, VR & AR, satellite imagery, EV battery modeling, etc) to produced data-driven business reports and guidance.

Education

MS, Biology: Physiology and Behavior 2014, San Francisco State University
BA, Psychology 2012, San Francisco State University