Apella builds ambient AI for operating rooms — software that gives surgical teams real-time OR visibility, predictive case-duration forecasts, and automated workflow tooling, helping hospitals serve more patients without adding staff. I work across the ML platform: training, deployment, and the developer tools that hold it all together.
Hi, I'm Alex — building thinking tools.
Staff Software Engineer at Apella, working on ML systems and developer tools for AI coding agents. Currently writing about Cortex, a shared organizational memory for Claude Code. 16 years across healthcare tech, fintech, and HR tech.
Work
See all work- Jun 2022 - CurrentApella TechnologyStaff Software Engineer — Machine Learning
- May 2020 - Jun 2022Haven TechnologiesLead Full-stack Software Engineer
- Led a team of three software engineers designing, developing, and maintaining a suite of in-house data management applications
- Achieved 80%+ reduction in manual data patching requests, boosting customer success team efficiency and reducing human errors
- Identified and addressed technical debt, increasing test coverage to over 80% across the codebase
- Provided comprehensive technical documentation, adopted best practices, and automated workflows to increase team productivity
- Jun 2018 - May 2020Lifion by ADPPlatform Engineer — Backend
- Contributed to a next-gen metadata-driven Human Capital Management platform built on highly scalable Node.js microservices
- Built and launched microservices handling metadata compilation, validation, and resolution, serving millions of daily requests
- Contributed to the Couchbase-to-AWS data migration, reducing licensing costs by more than $75,000
- Implemented service-health instrumentation across Kibana, Datadog, and Honeycomb, improving system reliability and reducing debugging time
- Mentored co-ops and ran Lunch & Learn sessions to share knowledge across teams
Recent writing
See all writing- When grep stops working75 notes and grep still works. Won't for much longer. SQLite + FTS5 in 375 lines of stdlib Python, BM25 with weighted boosts for repo, confidence, and recency. The vault stays markdown; the index is derived.
- Two curatorsNotes go wrong two ways: someone writes them wrong, or someone wrote them right and the world moved on. Two curators, one for each. Both feed the same vault. Both go through PR review.
- If you have `gh` you're inCortex ships as a Claude Code plugin now. One command, gh-authenticated, no clone, no env var. Two weeks in: 62 notes, 6 contributors, 1 of them a bot.
Recent projects
See all projects- Tabby.toA cloud-based tab manager — save, organize, and share collections of links across machines.
- Facial Keypoints Detection and Filter ApplicationCV pipeline that locates facial keypoints and applies real-time filters (e.g. sunglasses) via webcam.
- Dog Breed Detection with Transfer LearningHaar Cascades for face detection feeding a CNN (transfer learning) that classifies the dog's breed.
Let's connect
Reach out on social, drop me an email, or just say hi.