About me

My name's Tomás Alegre, though online most people know me as Alpha018.

Building backend systems is what I do for a living, mostly with NestJS and TypeScript. The framework of the week rarely interests me; what actually grabs my attention is what happens when a system has to hold up under real load — where the architecture breaks, what configuration nobody documented, why the benchmark everyone cites looks nothing like your actual case.

What I write about

I write about NestJS architecture and patterns, performance benchmarks with an explicit methodology (never "it's faster" without numbers attached), configuration management, and the infrastructure underneath it all: Docker, Kubernetes, a homelab that grows faster than I plan for.

The code I publish is real, never pseudocode — if a post carries a snippet, that snippet ran in a terminal of mine at some point.

Honesty first isn't a slogan here, it's a rule: when something has a trade-off, I say so, and I never sell a solution without pointing out where it falls apart.

Outside the code

I'm Chilean 🇨🇱, and off the keyboard I've got a list of obsessions that keeps growing.

This year I self-published my first novel, Circuito Rebelde, a dystopian sci-fi story with a cyberpunk edge. I needed the world's geography to stay consistent chapter to chapter, and notes in a document weren't cutting it anymore — so along the way I ended up building CityGen, a procedural city generator in Go.

My home lab runs on k3s, not because any of the above requires it, but because solving infrastructure problems for fun is something I do even when nobody's asking. That's where a handful of Minecraft servers for friends live, among other things.

Astrophotography (infinite patience for one blurry photo of a nebula), guitar, and flying lessons take up the rest of my time — still in training, but serious enough by now to have stopped being just an idea.

Where to find me

- GitHub: github.com/Alpha018

- Open source library: nestjs-redisom, nestjs-firebase-auth, nestjs-unleash-client, paper-config-optimized

- If something I wrote helped you: buymeacoffee.com/alpha018

This photo includes the star “Bellatrix”, which, to me, is the most beautiful star in the night sky.