About Me

Programmo, ergo sum

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This is Alexander Smirnov personal blog.

About Me

I'm Alexander Smirnov, a software engineer, open-source contributor, and AI entrepreneur based in the San Francisco Bay Area. My journey spans physics research, enterprise Java development, and now AI-powered solutions.

Background

Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, I graduated from Saint Petersburg State University with a master's degree in physics (Radio Physics Department, 1982-1989), where I earned the qualification of "Engineer-researcher of Radio Wave Propagation." After working in scientific instrumentation and IP telephony in Russia, I moved to the Bay Area where I've been for the past 20 years.

Open Source Legacy

I'm best known as the creator of Ajax4jsf and Jboss RichFaces — foundational JavaServer Faces component libraries that shaped Java web development from 2005-2016. What started as a personal side project called "Telamon" in early 2005 evolved into one of the widely-used Java Server Faces frameworks in enterprise applications.

Key contributions:

  • Created Ajax4jsf (2005), one of the first frameworks to merge Ajax with Java web development
  • Developed RichFaces at Exadel, later partnered with JBoss/Red Hat (2006-2016
  • Participated in JSF specification expert groups (JSR-252, JSR-314, JSR-344)
  • Presented at JavaOne conferences (2008, 2009, 2010)
  • Contributed to JBoss Portlet Bridge and Jakarta Faces specifications

RichFaces reached end-of-life in 2016 after serving the Java EE community for a decade, but the a4j: prefix still appears in legacy enterprise applications worldwide.

Professional Journey

After my open-source work at Exadel (2005-2011), I held engineering roles at:

  • Kaiser Permanente (2011-2013): Population management project, to predict risk of the 100+ chronical deceases, like diabetes and heart attacks.
  • BAM Labs (2013-2015): IoT smart bed sensors (acquired by Sleep Number for $58M and became Smart Beds product)
  • MuleSoft/Salesforce (2015-2025): Principal Engineer architecting high-throughput data platforms, handling 1GB/sec of logs, real-time metrics, and AI-powered data transformations

Current Focus: AI & Startups

I'm now Co-founder and CTO of Jobsflow.ai, an AI-powered recruitment platform serving both recruiters and job seekers. This reflects my pivot from enterprise Java to AI/ML, which began around 2012 with Stanford's NLP class and Coursera's Neural Networks course.

My areas of deep study include:

  • RAG systems: Retrieval augmented generation, chunking strategies, evaluation
  • AI agents: Multi-agent frameworks, memory systems, tool use
  • LLM applications: Fine-tuning, prompt engineering, embeddings
  • AI-assisted development: What I call "vibe coding" — leveraging Claude Code, Cursor, and Aider

Early Computing

Punched Card I started learning programming at high school — my first code was a bubble sort algorithm written in Algol 60, stored on punched cards. My first "code editor" was paper, pencil, blade, and glue to fix text directly on cards. From punch cards to AI agents — quite a journey! The first personal computer was decommissioned MIR 2: 8kb of memory, CRT display with light pen, typewriter as keyboard and printer, magnetic cards as storage, just half a ton weight. And unlimited precision: To get Pi with 1000 digits, use precision 1000 ; print PI . It also solved simple calculus equations at symbolic level. MIR 2 computer

Contact

Feel free to reach out through the social links below.