Alex Harri
AboutBlog
An image of me

About me

Hey, I'm Alex. I'm super interested in software and design — I've been writing about software-adjacent topics since 2019 (see blog).

I've been working as a software developer since early 2018, mostly at early-stage startups. I'm currently working at NeckCare.

Aside from that, I'm a soon-to-be father of one and I love physical activities of all forms — I've been playing padel a lot lately with friends from GRID.

Career

As a very early employee at Taktikal, and subsequently as a Tech Lead, I played a big part in the development of Taktikal's first products. I worked there for 4 years. Those were incredibly formative years — I gained invaluable experience in building applications from scratch and maintaining them as they evolve.

I joined GRID in 2022. I worked on their JavaScript-based spreadsheet engine running in the browser, their formula parser written in Rust, and I wrote some Python for the back-end. See "Making GRID's spreadsheet engine 10% faster".

After GRID, I spent a year and a half developing Arkio's modeling tools (Arkio is an architectural modeler and model reviewer written in C#). I learned a ton of 3D geometry and mathematics there. A few months into the job I wrote "Planes in 3D space" to share what I learned about the math behind planes.

I'm now working at NeckCare with two of my coworkers from GRID — they, and the rest of the team at NeckCare, are awesome people to work with. I'm enjoying life a lot right now.

Writing

My most popular post so far has been "The web’s clipboard, and how it stores data of different types", which I wrote in 2024. It looks at the evolution of the web's clipboard APIs and their limitations.

My first post of note was "The Engineering behind Figma's Vector Networks". It's a lengthy post covering many topics, containing over 200 diagrams and illustrations.

The first post I wrote containing interactive elements is "Multi-cursor code editing: An animated introduction". Written in 2022, it uses animated instances of the VS code editor to demonstrate use cases and techniques for multi-cursor code editing. This was quite a popular post!

I'm incredibly proud of my work on "Planes in 3D space". That post contains over 50 interactive 3D illustrations, intended to provide a visual and intuitive understanding of planes.

I've written three posts about TypeScript:

I've also written about monorepos, performance (twice) , and bit manipulation.

Projects

Many of my personal projects, including this website, can be found on my GitHub page.

Contact

You can contact me via a message on LinkedIn or by sending me an email (you can find my email address on my GitHub page).