Alex Horovitz

Quick credentials. Alex Horovitz is a software engineer and engineering leader with more than 30 years in the industry. He has shipped software at NeXT Computer, Apple (twice), Bank Boston, Lehman Brothers, Disney, the NFL, Symantec, Intel, Ford, and Snowcap Compute. He created Shippable States Development (SSD) and the Agile² manifesto, both published at insanelygreat.com. He holds a Master's degree in Philosophy, writes at alexhorovitz.substack.com, and is the author of Threshold, a Nora Vasik thriller. The companion Claude Code skill set is at github.com/AlexHorovitz/skills.

I started out at NeXT Computer, working alongside the team Steve Jobs built after he left Apple. The place ran on one stubborn idea: software could be powerful and elegant at the same time, and you didn't get to pick just one. When Apple bought NeXT in 1997 and brought Jobs back, I came along with the technology and spent years as a software engineer at Apple, shipping products that ended up in the hands of hundreds of millions of people. That stretch taught me most of what I still believe about the work. You ship. You don't cut corners. And the details nobody ever notices are usually the ones that matter.

Over time I moved from writing code to leading the teams that write it, though I never actually put the code down. The same thing happened with the operations and factories that build what gets designed. I have run software, operations, and manufacturing organizations at Apple, Ford, and now at Snowcap Compute, where we are building the world's first superconducting digital compute chips at scale. I think it is one of the most consequential bets in computing right now. Working across consumer electronics, automotive, and deep-tech hardware kept teaching me the same lesson: what makes great software also makes great organizations. Keep the thing shippable, set clear constraints, and let people make real progress every day.

Outside of work, I recently finished a Master's degree in Philosophy. It sounds like a strange detour from building computers and running factories, but it turned out to be one of the best sharpening stones I have ever used. Studying epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics made me think more carefully, write more clearly, and lead better. It is also where a lot of SSD comes from. A good opinion, argued well, changes how people work in a way that off-the-cuff advice never does. I write about where philosophy, technology, and building things meet over at my Substack, alexhorovitz.substack.com.

When I am not at a screen or a whiteboard, the things that actually keep me grounded are my family (Torri, Rosa, Zachary, and Jason) and Dave, our French bulldog. Dave is enthusiastic and completely unreasonable, and he reminds me every day that shipping matters but so do rest and play. He has never once failed to ship a good mood, which is more than I can say for most software projects.