Hi, I’m Alex, a software engineer and educator.

Contact info & links

Email
Zoom
Office hours Wednesdays 7–8 PM ET or by appointment
GitHub
@abreen
LinkedIn
@alexanderbreen
Replit
@abreen

About me

I was a BA/MS student and senior teaching assistant in the department of computer science at Boston University, from which I graduated in 2016.

From 2012 to 2016, I was in various teaching roles for CS courses at BU, Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School. In 2016, I was the recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Service award from BU’s department of computer science. I joined Wayfair in 2016 as a web developer.

In the ’10s I developed some open source tools for generating static sites from Markdown (Presto), a companion PHP application for accepting student submissions and displaying grades (Apollo), and two iterations of an automated grading tool, Socrates, first in Python and then a GUI application in Java.

I also designed the course websites for Dave Sullivan’s courses at BU and Harvard (e.g., CS 111 and E-22), which still use Presto today to generate HTML.

My interests include natural and programming languages, systems programming (operating systems, compilers), large/legacy software systems, education, video games, vintage computing, photography, and high-resolution audio.

Teaching

Work history

Education