Jeff helped lead the technology launch of MSNBC.com as part of an eight year career at Microsoft. He left Microsoft to found GiftSpot, later acquired by GiftCertificates.com. He’s a three time grantee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In 2009, he led the capture of missing writer Evan Ratliff in Wired magazine’s Vanish contest.
He pitched the idea of a building your own startup series to Envato Tuts+ in August 2014. After diagnosis of a brain tumor in 2015, he put the project on hold indefinitely. By 2016, he had resumed development. He's built Meeting Planner as a solo startup with broad assistance from the open source development community and several advisors.
Alex is one of the core maintainers of Yii PHP framework for more than 7 years, its representative in PHP-FIG, active conference speaker and participant of various other OpenSource projects.