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

Printed manuscript page with pencil margin marks beside a pencil and phone

Her Notes Were on Paper, So They Had to Point at Words

My first reader marks up drafts in pencil. Getting her notes into the editor meant anchoring every mark to the words it touched, never to a page or a position.

Brass key beside an open empty envelope as a scanner beam sweeps across it

The Scanner Clicked First

An invite link failed three seconds before my friend tapped it. Hotmail's link scanner had already spent the one-time token. The fix was a button.

Open card-catalog drawer with one card raised from the back beside a glucose meter

My Health Chat Asked Me to Paste My Own Data

Five times my health app's chat said a number was in my records but out of its sight. I stopped widening the window and gave it a way to ask for rows.

Four steel card-sorting trays, one tipping blank cards into its neighbour under hard side light

All Nine Errors Were the Same Class

I reproduced a published benchmark exactly: same accuracy, same manifest hash, same token count. Then the confusion matrix showed the headline was still misleading.

Brass ruler resting across a tall stack of printed transcript pages under dramatic side light

The Number That Was Just Word Count

I built a counter to measure four years of my own chat history, got a clean 41%, and then found out the number was almost entirely a proxy for turn length.

Open museum card catalogue drawer with a tagged bronze artifact resting on top

When the Official API Lies

A week of pulling museum accession numbers and biblical texts taught me that a 403 is honest and a 200 can be a lie. The fix was to stop being a client and open a browser.

Printed lab report pages fanned under amber side light beside a glowing phone

Everything Fragile Was Inside One Request

I wrote a non-negotiable rule about never making a web request wait on AI, then broke it in my own health feature. Three bugs later I saw they were all the same bug.

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.

Pikes Peak Economy

Every Business Formation Spike in Colorado Springs Traces to One Suite Number
Regional Economics

Every Business Formation Spike in Colorado Springs Traces to One Suite Number

A single commercial registered-agent suite on Kelly Johnson Blvd is the principal address on 4,495 El Paso County entities. Strip it out and the monthly formation series goes completely flat. No wrongdoing, just a measurement problem hiding in a public statistic.

A row of weathered survey stakes at nearly equal height across dry ground, one far taller at the end, mountain ridge on the horizon at dawn
Regional Economics

Nearly a Third of Colorado Springs Private Jobs Are in Sectors Whose Real Wage Went Nowhere

Between 2014 and 2025, five private sectors holding 76,332 El Paso County jobs saw their average real wage stall or fall. Health care, the county's largest private employer, gained $23 a week in eleven years.

A stethoscope coiled on a staffing roster clipboard on a dark exam-room counter, lit by hard amber side light against navy-charcoal shadow.
Regional Economics

The Only Part of the Colorado Springs Job Market Still Growing Is Health Care

One in five new Colorado Springs jobs over the last decade was in health care, and for the last two years it is the only part of the market still growing. A QCEW data brief on the sector carrying the county, and the paychecks that stood still.

An open card-catalog drawer of index cards lit by warm side light against deep shadow
Regional Economics

What Counts as a Closed Business?

An economic brief I published rests on a single number. The query was six lines. The hard part was deciding what "closed" and "in the county" actually mean across 1.5 million messy public records.

A dimly lit industrial pressure dial with its needle dropped low, mountain ridge faint in the background
Regional Economics

The One Number That Shows Colorado Springs' Business Engine Stalled in 2024

For a decade, Colorado Springs started about four businesses for every one that closed. In 2024 that ratio fell to 2.53 to 1, its lowest on record. Here is what the Secretary of State filings show, and why the closures landed where they did.

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