Alex Dean

At AWS, I work on supporting and extending functionality for EBS snapshots. On the team, I'm the service owner for EBS snapshot functionality in Outposts and Local Zones, offering EBS snapshot support for large organizations, governments, and other customers at edge data centers. These capabilities enable customers to run special workloads for data residency and isolation, local data processing, and low-latency compute purposes.

In addition, my team and I work on the following core functions:

• Metering — Sifting through trillions of snapshot chunks worldwide on a daily basis to accurately bill customers for their hourly snapshot usage
• Garbage Collection — Identifying billions of unreferenced snapshot chunks daily and marking them for deletion, freeing up space for Amazon S3
• Durability — Offering eleven 9s of durability for exabytes of snapshot data in S3 by performing data integrity checks and recovering chunks in failure cases
• Recycle Bin — Providing accidental deletion protection for EBS snapshots and EC2 Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)

---

Personal Projects

This list is ordered from most to least recent.

• Seattle Pets — Web visualization that uses data from the Seattle Open Data portal to showcase which areas of Seattle have the most pets. The site was built using React for visualization and OpenStreetMap for maps support. The original data CSV was processed and filtered down to a JSON to speed up data loading and visualization. A GeoJSON is used to center the circles along Seattle ZIP codes to indicate how many pets the area has. You can see the website and the GitHub page.
• Satellite Sonnet — Application that generates a daily Shakespearean sonnet about NASA's astronomy image of the day using AWS Lambda. The application uses NASA's public API to get the day's image, encodes the image into byte blocks, and sends the information to Anthropic's Claude for sonnet generation. The result is cached into DynamoDB to minimize further API calls. Upon users visiting the site, an atomic counter is incremented (using AttributeAction.ADD) to inform users of what "visitor number" they are. You can see the website, the frontend code, and the backend code.
• Write and Compare — Anki add-on that provides the Write and Compare note-type, allowing users to write multi-line answers to Anki cards and test their knowledge in a more active format. Instead of passively reviewing a card, this note type forces users to write down their answer for the question the card is posing, resulting in slower and stickier learning. You can see the GitHub page and AnkiWeb add-on.
• Generative Documentation & Testing — NPM package that functions as a CLI tool using the GPT 3.5 API to improve your JavaScript and TypeScript code. It helps you write better code by automatically generating documentation, refactoring code to improve performance and maintainability, adding unit tests using Jest, and converting JavaScript code to TypeScript. At its peak, the package had about 700 weekly downloads. You can see the NPM package and GitHub page.
• Generative Satire — Automated satirical news site monitoring recent events and generating Onion-style articles using LLMs; At its peak, the site had a viewership of about 1500 people per week. The application was built using a React frontend and a Node.js backend, with articles stored on a Firebase Realtime Database and multiple APIs used for image and content generation. The site is hosted on Google Cloud. You can see the website and the GitHub page.
• Read This to Me — Application that converts written text into audio from a wide variety of dialects, using the SpeechSynthesis Web API. The site was built using JavaScript and HTML/CSS. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages with a custom domain. You can see the website and GitHub page.
• Language Discovery — Application that applies various similarity algorithms on various human language data sets. By languages, I'm referencing frequency dictionaries for human languages, which catalog how frequently a word is used in one language relative to another. I examine topics like the average word length and the most popular color in a given langauge. You can see the website and GitHub page.