$whoami

Alex Mercer

Senior Software Engineer at Vercel

I build distributed systems and developer tools. Currently focused on edge computing, observability, and making infrastructure feel less like infrastructure. Previously at Linear and Stripe.

open to consulting TypeScript Rust Go distributed systems WebAssembly PostgreSQL

// selected projects

litestream-rs

Rust port of SQLite streaming replication. 3× lower memory, compatible wire protocol.

Rust SQLite S3
🔭
↗ demo

traceview

OTEL trace explorer with flame graphs. Self-hostable, sub-second query on 100M spans.

Go ClickHouse OTEL
🧩
↗ npm

schema-drift

CLI to detect breaking API changes between OpenAPI specs. Used by 200+ teams.

TypeScript Node OpenAPI
🗄️
↗ github

pgroll

Zero-downtime Postgres schema migrations with automatic rollback and dual-write.

Go PostgreSQL

// recent writing

systems How I cut p99 latency by 60% with connection pooling
rust Async Rust is finally good, actually
devtools Why your observability stack costs too much
wasm Running WebAssembly at the edge — lessons learned
postgres The hidden cost of JSONB columns