Engineer
First

15 years shipping production systems. Go, TypeScript, Kubernetes. Enterprise customer engineering at Apollo GraphQL. AI infrastructure at Atlas Health. Not a marketer who picked up a camera — an engineer who realized the most valuable developer content is the kind that can't be written by someone on the payroll.

Alderson.dev is an independent technical practice for developer tools companies: I bring independent technical judgment to Series A–C dev tools — building real implementations, publishing honest findings, and producing the third-party content internal teams can't credibly produce themselves.

What I Build

Technical content packages built from real implementation work. The pattern is the same on every engagement: I use the product the way a senior engineer would, ship something that runs in production, and publish a written assessment that holds up to scrutiny.

The engineering and the writing are the same person. That's the whole pitch — a technical buyer can read the article, clone the repo, and trace every claim back to working code, and the person who wrote both is reachable on the same email thread.

Publishing Discipline

I publish technical breakdowns through writing and my YouTube channel — that's where the independence is visible and proven. Client engagements are focused on engineering outcomes: working code, architecture clarity, and honest technical assessments that shape how your product is understood by the developer market.

The Stack

Languages: Python (primary, AI/agent work), TypeScript (full-stack and Node services), Go (data infrastructure and high-throughput systems)

Infrastructure: Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, pgvector, Docker. Comfortable with managed platforms (Render, Modal, Vercel) and the underlying primitives both of them abstract over.

AI: Direct API integration to OpenAI, Anthropic, and open-source models. LangChain and the rest of the framework cycle when they earn their place — not by default. LiveKit for real-time voice agents. Playwright for browser-driven multi-agent workflows.

Production discipline: OpenTelemetry, structured logging, circuit breakers, retry logic, graceful degradation. Treating LLM calls like any other unreliable network dependency.

Sound architecture over framework churn. The interesting question is rarely which library — it's which parts of the problem actually need AI, and which parts are better solved by a SQL query or a state machine.

Based in Arizona. Truck in the desert. Operates nomadically. One engineer, not an agency — which means you work directly with the person producing the work, not a project manager farming it out.

Work With Me

I take on 2–3 engagements at a time. If you run a developer tools company with a strong product and thin third-party proof in the market, let's talk.

Book a Discovery Call →