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A demo About page that migrates the Starfolio homepage into Lucode Starlight.

Hi, I'm Alex

Full-stack engineer turned indie founder. I love building developer tools, fast UIs, and products people actually use.

Alex Mercer

About

In early 2023, I left a senior engineering role to go all-in on building my own SaaS products. Before that, I completed a double degree in computer science and business, interned at companies like Stripe and Cloudflare, and competed in 18+ hackathons. I also spent a summer in San Francisco as part of a founder residency focused on shipping fast and finding early customers.

Work Experience

Meridian Labs Co-founder & Engineer
January 2023 - Present

Building a suite of developer productivity tools focused on local-first architecture and offline sync. Grew to 1,200 paying customers within the first year. Responsible for the full stack - product, engineering, and growth.

Stripe Software Engineer Intern
May 2022 - August 2022

Worked on the Payments Infrastructure team. Built an internal load-testing framework in Go that reduced regression testing time by 60%. Contributed to the migration of legacy billing logic to a new event-driven architecture using Kafka.

Cloudflare Software Engineer Intern
September 2021 - December 2021

Joined the Workers team during a co-op term. Implemented a new dashboard UI for monitoring Worker invocation metrics using React and D3. Added support for custom error boundaries in the Workers runtime sandbox.

Datadog Software Engineer Intern
January 2021 - April 2021

Built new alert correlation features in the Incidents product using Python and React. Improved p99 query latency on the metrics explorer by 40% through query plan optimizations in PostgreSQL.

Benchling Software Engineer Intern
May 2020 - August 2020

Worked on the scientific data platform team. Implemented a bulk import pipeline for lab instrument data using TypeScript and AWS Lambda, reducing manual data entry time for research teams by over 80%.

Relay Labs Software Engineer Intern
September 2019 - December 2019

Early-stage startup building workflow automation tools. Shipped core integrations with Slack, Notion, and GitHub. Designed the initial webhook delivery system in Node.js that handled over 500k events per day at peak.

Education

Skills

Astro React Next.js TypeScript Node.js Python Go Postgres Docker Kubernetes
My Projects

Check out my latest work

I've worked on a variety of projects, from simple websites to complex web applications. Here are a few of my favorites.

Stackwise

March 2024 - Present

Open

Built an AI-powered code review tool that integrates with GitHub PRs and provides context-aware feedback based on your team's codebase conventions. Used by 300+ engineering teams.

Next.jsTypeScriptPostgreSQLPrismaTailwindCSSStripeShadcn UIOpenAI API

Logport

October 2023 - February 2024

Open

Open-source structured logging dashboard for Node.js and Python services. Ingest logs via a lightweight SDK, query them with a SQL-like syntax, and set up alerts in minutes.

Next.jsTypeScriptClickHouseTailwindCSSShadcn UICloudflare Workers

Formbase

June 2023 - September 2023

Open

A headless form backend that handles submissions, spam filtering, file uploads, and email notifications - no server required. Drop in one script tag and you're done.

AstroTypeScriptCloudflare WorkersTailwindCSSStripeResend

Patchwork

February 2023 - May 2023

Open

A visual diff tool for design tokens and Tailwind config changes. Connect it to your repo and get a live preview of how a config change affects every component in your design system.

Next.jsTypeScriptTailwindCSSShadcn UIVercel
Photos

My Recent Travels

Hackathons

I like building things

During my time in university, I attended 6+ hackathons. People from around the country would come together and build incredible things in 2-3 days. It was eye-opening to see the endless possibilities brought to life by a group of motivated and passionate individuals.

October 14th - 16th, 2022

PNW Hacks 2022

Seattle, Washington

Built a real-time collaborative code review tool using WebSockets and Monaco Editor. Won best developer tool.

January 15th - 16th, 2022

nwHacks 2022

Vancouver, BC

Created an accessibility-first browser extension that rewrites complex legal documents into plain English using GPT-3.

September 17th - 19th, 2021

HackTheNorth 2021

Waterloo, Ontario (Remote)

Built a distributed key-value store in Go with a Raft consensus implementation from scratch. Finalist in the systems track.

October 9th - 10th, 2021

DubHacks 2021

Seattle, Washington

Developed a carbon footprint tracker that integrates with Google Maps to suggest lower-emission commute alternatives.

April 24th - 25th, 2021

StormHacks 2021

Burnaby, BC (Remote)

Built a multiplayer browser game where players collaboratively debug a shared codebase before a timer runs out.

November 14th - 15th, 2020

HackCamp 2020

Vancouver, BC (Remote)

Created a CLI tool that automatically generates unit test scaffolding from TypeScript function signatures using static analysis.

Contact

Get in Touch

Want to chat? Just shoot me a dm with a direct question on Twitter and I'll respond whenever I can. I will ignore all soliciting.

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