Alex Poulos (PhD) – Full Stack Cloud Developer

Resume.

I’m a Full Stack Cloud Developer at the Washington Post, where I work in the Arc Publishing division on the Video Center product. I love this role because it truly is full-stack: on any given day I might move from touching up a Dockerfile and writing some CloudFormation, to diagnosing some slow MongoDB queries, after which I write some app layer code in Java or TypeScript and then move over to React for the front-end.

Like many of my generation, I began writing code in middle school on a TI-83+ graphing calculator. I’ve been writing software on and off since. I did Java and Linux development at IBM for 3.5 years while in university, and then returned to technology full-time in the spring of 2019, after finishing a PhD in Classical Literature at Catholic University of America. My dissertation was a study of the ancient Greek poetry of the early Christian poet Gregory of Nazianzus.

In addition to my full-time work, I’ve also done some freelance work over the past few years. Most recently, I’ve been working with a friend on public health software for planning health campaigns.

My tech stack of choice, at present, is serverless:

I also have a fair amount of experience building and deploying more traditional containerized apps in both AWS (ECS) and GCP (GKE) with a variety of storage systems (Postgres and Mongo primarily). I’ve done a smattering of mobile development, some in Swift and some in React Native. I hold the AWS Solutions Architect, Associate certification. I love wrapping my mind around complicated systems and making different pieces work together: it’s not unlike rendering a difficult piece of Ancient Greek verse into English.

I retain my research interests in Ancient Greek and Latin literature. You can find my thoughts on literature and original poetry at alexpoulos.com.