About

Hi!

I’m Alex Henderson, and I live in Titirangi, Auckland with my wife Renee and our daughter Ivy.

I’ve been writing software professionally since I was a teenager, which means almost 30 years of shipping things, breaking things, and (mostly) learning from the latter. I’m currently a Distinguished Engineer at Auror, where I help shape engineering strategy as we keep scaling.

Alongside Auror I’m CTO and co-founder of Worklibrary (formerly Zoolibrary), and a fractional CTO at Birdeey — both companies I’m genuinely excited about.

Previously I was VP of Engineering at Pushpay (joining as engineer #5 and helping grow the team ~10x through hyper-growth) and CTO at First AML.

More information

My interests these days span the full arc of building and scaling SaaS businesses — product, engineering, and the messy bits in between. I’m particularly drawn to the growth and scaling stage, where the org you have isn’t quite the org you need yet, and you have to figure out how to get there without breaking what’s working.

A non-exhaustive list of things I’m thinking about a lot right now:

  • Growing and scaling SaaS businesses (the people side and the systems side, equally).
  • AI and agentic coding — investing heavily in both how we work and what we ship.
  • Engineering leadership, coaching, and helping senior engineers find their next gear.
  • Product/engineering interactions and how to make that boundary actually work.
  • Distributed systems, APIs, and back-end services (still a soft spot for me).
  • Solution design and architecture in brown-field environments.
  • Feature planning, delivery, and the underrated craft of estimation.

My main languages and tools are C# / .NET, Python, TypeScript / JavaScript, and React — though I try not to be too precious about any of them.

I still enjoy being wrong and having my opinions challenged — it’s a good reminder of why I love this craft. I still prefer brown-fields to green-fields. I still hate meetings without agendas, and weak opinions held strongly.

And yeah, I’m still just a little bitter now and again — but I only use that trait for good.

This is my professional blog, and all opinions held here are my own and do not represent the opinions of the companies I work with.