About 
I (he/him) am a senior software engineer with a focus on scalable distributed systems and backend APIs. I have extensive experience architecting and building security-conscious high-throughput services.
In my spare time I like to build things, be active, and play video games. I have a healthy obsession with playing and watching hockey, disc golf and snowboarding.
Projects
Oranos
Oranos is a very hard 2d platformer. Built with Godot engine. Source code can be found on github.
The Good Winds
The Good Winds is a disc-golf weather app that helps find the best times to play in the coming week. Weather is chunked into blocks and ranked based on a blended analysis of Wind, Temperature, Precipitation, and Time of Day. Source code can be found on github.
Warzone Drop
Warzone Drop is a helper app for the popular battle royale game Call of Duty: Warzone. Warzone Drop randomly selects a valid point of interest to land at when the game starts for both Caldera and Rebirth maps. Source code can be found on github.
AlexLaviolette.ca
AlexLaviolette.ca is a minimalist static site hosted and deployed via Netlify. Source code can be found on github.
Work
OnlyForward
Founding Engineer - AI Initiatives (May - September 2024)
- Designed and implemented the backend for a choose-your-own-adventure walking app that used OpenAI Assistants API and Dall-E to generate text and images for NPC interactions, environment descriptions, and combat encounters. Running Flask on Heroku backed by Redis. Used eventlets and RQ to queue AI jobs and run them asynchronously.
- Built an AI tour guide that integrated Google places api, OpenAI Assistant and Tavily using a langchain pipeline to generate interesting tour-guide information about your surroundings.
- Created an NPC Generator that used OpenAI Assistant and Dall-E to generate images and information for DnD style NPCs.
- Trained my own AI to detect hotdogs or not hotdogs using both TensorFlow with Keras and Google VertexAI to compare accuracy, cost, and implementation time.
Founding Engineer - Throw.app (August 2022 - April 2024)
- Designed and built a backend api for realtime multi-user remote working software. Built in Phoenix Elixir w/ Postgresql & Redis. Supported chat, audio & video calling.
- Utilized websockets, channels and message passing to allow users to communicate with each other continuously.
- Created the frontend and backend for several realtime multiplayer games from scratch as part of our offering. Used liveview, javascript and jquery to dynamically update the dom to represent game states. The game servers were written in Elixir using GenServers.
- Built a web-based "lobby" application using similar techniques to host social events for remote teams where they could play these games on demand.
- Designed and implemented a fully-fledged battlepass and reward system.
Founding Engineer - Gov'r (May - July 2022)
- Architected and built a backend api to serve rep and election information as well as social media content to the client. Built in Python Flask w/ MySQL & Redis
- Scraped elected representative and candidate information from Wikipedia and a variety of sources to build the most complete database of canadian political reps in existence.
- Pulled shapefiles for federal, provincial, and municipal electoral districts and pre-calculated which district every Canadian postal code is located in to properly serve the correct representatives.
TunnelBear VPN / McAfee
Lead Software Engineer (May 2020 - April 2022)
- Developed a new Load Balancing Algorithm based off of real-time TimeScale data which improved VPN performance by 12% and load distribution by 85%.
- Architected and implemented Tiered VPN Region Infrastructure in Scala allowing us to segment our VPN infrastructure and our users.
- Designed and built a fleet of Dockerized Python speedtesting apps that run over 20k speedtests per day on our VPNs as well as on competitor VPNs. This fleet is managed using Terraform and runs on AWS Lightsail.
- Helped implement our Wireguard Linux Client in Rust
- Led our HackerOne team responsible for triaging and fixing vulnerabilities.
- Led our on-call team - personally running all on-boarding, training, and process improvements.
- Contributed to the transition of our entire infrastructure to Docker/Terraform/AWS
- Designed and built a public status page integrating with NewRelic, Pingdom, and Opsgenie.
- Represented our Backend services in annual independant Security Audits run by Cure53
Software Engineering Manager (Nov 2018 - May 2020)
- Managed a team of 5 engineers ranging from Junior to Senior while continuing to contribute signficantly to our backend systems.
- Joined and became an active member of our diversity club, leading a number of diversity related initiatives.
- Built a new partner dashboard reducing VPN Partner onboarding time from 2 weeks to 2 minutes.
- Designed and implemented a new API in Play2/Scala for the TunnelBear mobile app reducing client median connection time from 7 seconds down to 5 seconds.
- Worked alongside Director of Engineering to design and implement a career ladder.
- Designed and created extensive processes for our on-call team to improve uptime and quality of life.
Senior Software Engineer (Jan 2016 - Nove 2018)
- Architected and built a white-label VPN API from scratch in Play2/Scala that now serves 216M requests per day with an average internal response time of less than 20ms.
- Migrated 1.5M Stripe customers worth $8.5M USD/year to a new account using multi-threaded Python scripts without any loss of revenue or service interruption.
- Designed and participated in red team exercises such as internal hacking and phishing.
- Mentored, trained, and had 1on1's with other backend engineers
Software Engineer (Jan 2014 - Jan 2016)
- Designed and built Python/Flask REST API that provides discovery and management of our VPNs.
- Worked extensively on the TunnelBear Android app introducing new features like fastest tunnel.
- Developed internal dashboard displaying a variety of financial and usage metrics in Java/Play Framework.
Symphony Commerce
Software Engineering Intern (May - Aug 2013)
- Produced the front and back ends of both the store catalog and coupon sections of the administrative portal.
- Applied data‐driven methodologies to add critical functionality to a Java/Spring e‐commerce platform.
- Created custom directives and controllers using Angular.js to realize complex front‐end interactions.
- Nominated for the 2013 Waterloo Co‐op Student of the Year.
Nulayer/Pressly
Software Engineering Intern (Sep - Dec 2012)
- Created an administrative dashboard for "TheScore" Mobile app, responsible for managing millions of user accounts in Ruby on Rails.
- Wrote a JSON diff web application to ensure consistent payloads across builds.
- Worked on the backbone.js, coffeescript front‐end of Pressly self‐serve, a complex content‐publishing application.
- Developed the website "pressly.com" in it's entirety from PSDs in HTML/Js/Jquery.
- Nominated for the 2012 Waterloo Co‐op Student of the Year.
DemonWare/Activision
Software Engineering Intern (Jan - May 2012)
- Worked on the DevZone internal Python/Django web application, responsible for allowing access to the features of DemonWare's software.
- Exposed a permissions system for online gaming both in the application and via backend API.
- Wrote a management command for cleansing millions of stale files and database entries.
- Developed a module to automatically setup and configure servers for testing.
- Listed in the credits for Prototype 2 for my work in supporting DevZone.
VMFarms
Software Engineering Intern (May - Aug 2011)
- Created a CPU weighting deamon in Python to work with the Xen hypervisor
- Developed a dashboard in Python/Django that pulled large amounts of data leading to experience with caching and query optimization.
- Produced the front and back ends of a DNS Manager that enabled customers to add and remove domains and sub‐domains of all types.
- Wrote an NSlookup script that verifies if a domain is properly pointed to the correct name servers.