Alies Lapatsin
About Me #
I’m a Staff-level engineer with 13 years of experience building and scaling web systems. I care deeply about code quality, performance, and developer experience — and I build tools to make all three better.
Currently, I'm an Engineering Lead at Interaction Design Foundation, where I’ve grown from a frontend developer to the technical leader of the platform. I built and grew the engineering team — hiring, onboarding, setting up quality gates, CI/CD workflows, coding standards, and documentation culture.
What I do #
- System design & performance — p50 latency at 53ms, 94.7% of requests under 200ms. I scale through optimization, not hardware.
- Code quality systems — early adopter of Psalm, PHPStan, and Rector in the Laravel ecosystem. Built custom rules, enforced static analysis as CI gates.
- Developer tooling — I build tools that save developers time. Recently: awesome-ai-friendly-cli, a curated list of CLI flags that cut AI agent token waste across ecosystems.
- People & hiring — hired ~30 engineers, built the engineering handbook and documentation culture from scratch.
- AI adoption — led the team’s AI transformation: documentation-first codebase design, AI-assisted code reviews, and agent-ready tooling.
Open source #
Maintainer of psalm-plugin-laravel. Contributor to Laravel, Psalm, and Rector. I maintain public engineering documentation that’s used as a quality reference by other teams.
This blog #
I write about AI, PHP, Laravel, developer tooling, and developer experience. Mostly the things I wish someone had written before I figured them out the hard way.
I’m always interested in hard engineering problems and connecting with people who care about code quality. Say hi on LinkedIn or X.