TaskFlow
A tiny dependency-free job scheduler for Node — priority queues, backpressure, and graceful shutdown, all under 5kB. ~40k weekly npm downloads.
Node.jsOpen sourceScheduling
Open to summer internships
Alex Chen
Computer science student
CS student at USC who lives at the seam between systems — schedulers, build tooling, and the glue that makes other software faster. I learn by shipping.
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about
I'm drawn to problems at the seam between systems — schedulers, build tooling, the glue that makes other software faster. Most of what I know came from breaking something in prod and fixing it by Monday. I've rebuilt Ramp's transaction-ingestion retry layer, shipped content-addressed build caching in Vercel's CLI, and I'm building a fair GPU scheduler in the USC Systems Lab. I'm looking for a summer 2026 internship where I can own a real surface, not a ticket queue.
- →Cut p99 latency 38% and near-eliminated duplicate writes on Ramp's ingestion layer
- →~25% faster cold monorepo builds via content-addressed cache keys at Vercel
- →1st place, HackSC 2025 — national, 300+ teams
- →Dean's list every semester at USC Viterbi
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work
- Summer 2026
SWE Intern · Ramp
Rebuilt the transaction-ingestion retry layer, cutting duplicate writes to basically zero and dropping p99 latency by 38%. Shipped to prod in week 6.
- Summer 2025
SWE Intern · Vercel
Built caching for the CLI — added content-addressed cache keys for a ~25% median build-time win on cold monorepo builds.
- 2024 – Present
Research Assistant · USC Systems Lab
Building a scheduler simulator for fair GPU sharing across ML training jobs. Second author on a paper under submission.
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projects
Coldstart
A Go CLI that pre-warms serverless functions from your deploy config so the first real request doesn't eat the cold start.
GoCLIServerless
gpu-fairshare
The open-sourced research scheduler: a Python simulator for weighted-fair GPU allocation with a replayable trace format.
PythonSimulationScheduling
Real-time Collaborative Code Review
A serverless, account-free collaborative code-review tool over WebRTC, built in 36 hours. Won HackSC 2025 against 300+ teams.
WebRTCReal-timeHackathon
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awards
- →1st place, HackSC 2025 — National hackathon, 300+ teams
- →Dean's List — Every semester at USC Viterbi