Alex Gaetano Padula

HELLO WORLD!!

I'm Alex, and I've been obsessed with computers since I got my first one at 7 years old. While other kids were playing video games, I was taking apart my computer to see how it worked (much to my parents' horror). That curiosity led me down a rabbit hole that I'm still exploring 20+ years later.

At 13, I discovered programming and fell in love with the idea that you could make computers do almost anything. Started with game development, moving into web stuff, and by 16 I was running my own freelance business building software, applications, and websites for anyone who'd pay me.

But life's funny - I took some detours. Worked as a carpenter, a train conductor, a line cook, and more! Now I'm in customer success and operations at a payments company. Each path taught me something different.

These days, I spend my nights and weekends building storage systems. Why? Because they're at the heart of everything, and I love the challenge of making data storage fast, reliable, and elegant.

"I have a genuine interest and passion with a drive that is probably crazy to some."

Chips, Chisels, and Code

7-13

First Computer & Interest in electronics

Got my first computer and immediately started taking it apart. Parents thought I'd broken it, but I was just figuring out how everything connected. I'd get electronics as well and take them apart. It's interesting I remember making my own amplifier for a set of speakers I found with a car battery ( yes, I was that kid ).

13-16

Started Programming

I discovered programming through an interest in online games. At the time I was playing RuneScape and MapleStory (rather obsessed as always) I wanted to understand how the games worked, how the network allowed for all these simultaneous connections from all over the world. This led me into game development and network programming; I'd spend most of my days trying to reverse engineer how these games worked. Spent countless hours learning C, C++, Java and nose deep in forums, books and more. I was hooked.

Age 16-20

Freelance Business

Started my own freelance development business, building everything from property management systems to law firm websites using Rails, React, Node.js, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and more. No challenge was too big - I built everything from the ground up, learning new technologies as I went. I was working part-time jobs as well, crazy time.

20-24

Away From Screen Experience

I worked as a cook, labourer, carpenter and train conductor. Learned about building physical systems, leadership, safety, awareness, more engineering, and to work under pressure at any time of day. Never stopped programming though (literally obsessed). I remember writing my own VST at one point and even have a track from the experience you can find here: SoundCloud (Mesmic - Natural (2010)).

24-27

Back to Tech

Led engineering team and architected a high-scale political messaging and automated voice response platform, processing over 100 million texts and calls daily during peak periods. Modernized legacy PHP systems by migrating to a contemporary technology stack with real-time, multi-tenant architecture that dynamically scaled based on demand. Successfully delivered the platform which led to acquisition by a larger organization.

27+ Modern day

Customer Success + Database Life Style

Working in customer success and operations at Paymentus by day, building storage systems by night and on weekends. It's the perfect balance of helping people and creating new things.

Currently Working On

I am always tinkering with something new. Right now I'm exploring more advanced concurrency patterns and seeing how far I can push performance without sacrificing reliability with Wildcat.

You can find more open-source projects on my Github!

Wildcat

My latest storage engine obsession. MVCC, lock-free data structures, and enough documentation to make your head spin. Write it because I wanted to see if I could make writes and background operations truly non-blocking.

TidesDB

Cross-platform embedded storage engine (LSM Tree). Written in C with non-multi level approach on disk, pair-wise merging, incremental and manual compactions, and more! Started this because sometimes you need something that just works everywhere and is lightweight, and simple.

AriaSQL

Full relational database because why not? Supports SQL-86, stored procedures, replication. Turns out building a query parser and executor is actually pretty fun and seriously damn hard. I am rewriting the system to follow a more System-R approach on the side, it's taking a while but I am enjoying the process. Long-term I'd like to implement modern SQL.

CursusDB

Distributed document database with real-time capabilities, custom query language, and more. Wrote this when I got curious about how to make databases scale horizontally without losing your mind. CursusDB was one of my first attempts at writing a database, from completely knowing nothing about internals, lexical analysis, parsing, executing and more. It was a great learning experience and I would love to revisit sometime in the future.

SuperMassive

In-memory distributed key-value store that can handle 300k+ ops/sec. Named it SuperMassive because it's designed to handle, well, massive workloads.

Starskey

Fast embedded LSM-tree with T-Tree memtables. Sometimes you just want to experiment with different data structures and see what happens. Also modelled a bit after LevelDB.

VFSLite

VFSLite is a lightweight virtual file system. Open-source and self-contained in a single file.

fairyMQ

fairyMQ is a distributed high throughput in-memory yet persisted open-source messaging and streaming system(message queue).

Let's Connect

If you want to chat about databases, programming, or just life in general, feel free to reach out via email or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always up for a good conversation!