Portrait of Alex V. Wilson

I build practical systems and small tools that reduce friction.

I’ve spent a long time focused on automation and reliability. These days I’m publishing new work, sharing notes as I go, and gradually turning old ideas into real projects.

This site is a living log of what I’m building. LinkedIn is my resume.

Featured build: Site Engine (HeadstringWeb.com)

A reusable foundation I built to power my websites and experiments, so I can ship without rebuilding the basics each time.

Highlights

  • Supports multiple sites with consistent structure and rules

  • Clear draft vs published behavior

  • Theming designed to work in light and dark mode

About

Calm systems, clear rules, steady progress

I’ve spent most of my career working on the kinds of systems where reliability matters, the work sits behind the scenes, and small mistakes can become big problems. That shaped how I think, I prefer clear inputs, predictable outputs, and tooling that makes work feel calmer.

What I’m optimizing for now

At this point, I’m most interested in roles that feel focused and sustainable. Smaller teams, clearer priorities, and a pace that leaves room for deep work. I’m remote-first, but flexible when the role fits.

I’m not trying to “escape” any industry. I’m choosing the kind of environment and cadence that helps me do my best work. If the right opportunity shows up in finance or another high-compliance space, I’m open to it.

What I’m doing right now

I’m working on Site Engine, a foundation for running multiple sites from one engine. It lets me ship without rebuilding basics each time, and it gives me a place to explore practical AI-assisted workflows, in a way that stays grounded in real constraints.

How I like to work

  • Clear rules and clean data shapes

  • Small slices, shipped and verified

  • Observability and failure modes considered early

  • Simple UI, strong backend discipline

If you’re hiring

I’m a strong fit for backend engineering, data-heavy work (SQL, ETL, pipelines), automation, and internal tools. I can’t share past employer code, but I can talk clearly about architecture, tradeoffs, and how to make systems more reliable over time.

If you’re a builder

I keep notes on decisions, mistakes, and what actually worked while building Site Engine and other experiments. No hype, just the process.

Site Engine

Powers HeadstringWeb.com and this site.

The system behind my sites and experiments.

Visit

MonkeyNutz demo site

A live sandbox to test features, experiments and workflows.

Visit

In progress: Small tools

Coming soon

A growing set of utilities and experiments I’m creating one by one.

Projects

Handheld blood glucose meter and scattered test strips under dramatic amber side lighting

Every Fasting Reading Showed Up at Lunch

I pulled 800 readings off a blood glucose meter with a browser tab. The meter was right about all of them. My parser was six hours wrong about every single one.

Open card catalog drawer with one blank index card lifted from the row

The Dataset in My Notes Wasn't the One on Disk

Five separate bugs in one week of training-data work, and every one of them was the same bug: I had been auditing the description of the data instead of the data.

Rear of a small computer, one cable connected, one unplugged in shadow

The Fixes That Lived on One Machine

My deploy box is not allowed to commit code. Last week I found out it had been quietly fixing itself anyway, and those fixes existed in exactly one place on earth.

Open handwritten notebook, pen and TV remote on a dark table in television glow

The Notebook Was The Dataset

My wife has written down every movie we watch together since 2023.

Hourglass with sand halted mid-fall, amber server lights glowing behind

The Timeout That Measured Nothing

My UI announced a failure for a job that was fine. Three fixes later, the one that actually solved it was deleting a client-side timer that measured nothing.

Open card catalog drawer with one index card missing from the row

The Bugs That Only Appear on the Second Run

Putting a working pipeline on a schedule surfaced four bugs that were invisible on run one, including one that ate 12,563 business formation records.

Brass balance scale tipping under a thick stack of manuscript pages

The File That Was 269 Characters Too Big

My writing app's assistant kept saying it couldn't see the world bible. It took four commits to find out the file was 269 characters over the budget.

Blurred modal dialog on a dark screen with one amber highlighted button

The Allow Button Doesn't OCR

Permission dialogs sat on my agent's console until I happened to notice. Building a watcher that could see them, and click them, meant OCR, geometry, and one very small allowlist.

A small aluminum desktop computer on a shelf, single amber status light glowing, network cable fading into shadow

The Mac Mini Is the Cloud Now

This week I deleted a cloud job runner and moved my site builder's AI onto a Mac Mini in my house. The reasoning beat the wiring.

Get in Touch

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