The Difference is A Passion for Excellence
When you work with someone who is passionate about what they do, it shows in the quality of their work.
Hi, my name is Steven. I'm a software engineer with over 20 years of experience building software for a wide variety of industries. I've worked with companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. I'm passionate about building high quality software that is a joy to use.
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Skills and Proficiencies
I strive to be a well-rounded engineer, and I'm constantly learning new skills and technologies. Here are some of the skills I've acquired over the years.
Agile
Certified Scrummaster with deep understanding of how to maximize the value of Agile processes for both business/product stakeholders and engineering teams. Skilled in the ability to run efficient, yet effective sprint ceremonies. Understanding of the relationship between well-oiled Agile workflows and the ability of engineering teams to continuously deliver product iterations.
Certified ScrumMaster via ScrumAlliance
DX / Tooling
ESLint/Stylelint/Prettier, JSDoc/TSDoc, Docker/VS COde Dev Containers.
Javascript / Typescript / Node.js
Deep understanding of both current and historical context, ecosystems,
constraints/challenges, tooling, and landscape. Understand differences
between ESM/CJS/UMD, and interoperability between the different formats.
Experience with writing Node libraries/packages and best practices for
targeting and bundling for specific platforms (Node.js vs browser vs
universal) for optimizing consumability. Highly knowledgeable in
exception handling and remediation. Well versed in principles like SOLID,
functional programming, and composability; and knowledgeable in other common
design patterns and abstractions.
Frontend / Web Applications
Expert in HTML/CSS/ReactJS, highly proficient with Next.js 13, Vite.js, styled-components, and Tailwind CSS. Extensive experience with both designing and developing clean, elegant, responsive, and accessible user interfaces; including translating designs from tools like Figma into pixel-perfect, functional frontends. Experience using libraries like Apollo Client, tRPC and react-query to reliably and performantly make typesafe queries to backend services for data.
Attended Ryan Florence's React Workshop
Backend / APIs / Web Services
Strong knowledge of best practices techniques/patterns/tooling for writing
backend/API services; Creating and configurating secure HTTP servers via native
Node.js APIs, or with libraries like Express.js or HAPI. Input/output validation v
ia libraries like Zod. Database ORMs like Sequelize, DrizzleORM, TypeORM, or
Prisma.js. Implementing Web Socket servers via Socket.io.
Creation and management of worker queues.
Code Quality / Testing
Jest/Vitest and react-testing-library for unit testing React components, have experience with other test runner/assertion/utility libraries like Chai, Jasmine, Ava, and Enzyme. Have used Cypress, Nightwatch, and Playwright for writing E2E tests.
Completed Kent C. Dodds' JavaScript Testing Workshop
DevOps
Highly knowledgeable in creation of optimized
CI/CD pipelines using platforms like GitHub Actions,
Jenkins, CircleCI, and others. Extensive experience
with container orechestration tools Docker/Docker Composer,
and Kubernetes.
Cloud Infrastructure
Extensive experience with AWS, have also used GCP and Azure Cloud. Have
utilized a variety of infrastructure-as-code tools such as CloudFormation,
AWS CDK, and Terraform for defining and provisioning cloud resources.
Have utilized numerous AWS services, including CloudFormation,
Cognito, ECS (Fargate), Lambda, SQS, SNS, RDS, S3, and AppSync among others.
Other
Proficient in Linux/Unix-based operating systems, Python, shell scripting, automating processes and tasks. Utilizing AI tools to increase productivity.
CompTIA A+ Certified
Professional Work Experience
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Senior Engineer
February 2023 – August 2023
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Senior Engineer
- Tasked with the migration and unification of the legacy “School/Class/Student Profile” report applications to a single Next.js 13 application.
- Migrated and refactored existing code following best practices and patterns including SOLID principles, to create highly composable, single-focus components with context providers/consumers, and hooks.
- Gained valuable experience implementing the core features and functionality of Next.js 13 and led initiatives to implement new patterns such as the App Router, Server Components, and Server Actions.
- Utilized broad experience in application/service release pipeline automation to solve issues with long build/release times using various methods like optimization of layers in Docker container definitions, utilizing dependency store caches, the caching of both task orchestration artifacts and their inputs to prevent running pipeline jobs needlessly, and CI job caching in BitBucket.
Jaguar Land Rover
Senior Engineer
October 2022 – November 2022
Jaguar Land Rover
Senior Engineer
- Sole engineer embedded in the Design/UX Research organization responsible for building a Web application that enables designers and UI/UX researchers to embed prototypes created in various tools such as Proto.io and Figma, and capture user interactions for analysis.
- Designed and built a highly scalable, full stack Web application, along with accompanying backend services, using VS Code Dev Containers for consistent development environments, PNPM for mono- repository workspace tooling, Turborepo for task orchestration, Docker Compose for local development, Vite/React/Tailwind on the frontend, and Express/Prisma/GraphQL on the backend.
- Utilized deep understanding of foundational Web technologies such as the HTTP protocol, iframes, cookies and nginx reverse proxies, to extend the functionality of the prototyping tools and implement a novel solution that went far and beyond the expectations of the product team.
- Automated the previously manual process of importing, processing, and uploading of prototypes, which eliminated the need for two roles, allowing those team members to focus on more valuable work.
Nike
Senior Engineer
Nov 2022 – Jun 2023
Nike
Senior Engineer
- Acted as the sole engineer on team in the innovation organization, responsible for the creation of a Web application used by product teams at Nike to understand and quickly find information about the organizational structure and taxonomy of any team in the company.
- Designed, documented, and built a highly scalable, performant Web application and supporting services using a Node.js, Typescript, Vite.js, React, and GraphQL application stack running on an AWS ECS (Fargate)/ECR, AppSync infrastructure defined in and managed by CloudFormation templates.
- Used React and styled-components along with optimized CSS animations to build an elegant and user-friendly frontend application that followed and adhered to usability and accessibility best practices.
- implemented a mono-repository via PNPM workspaces and Turborepo, along with the latest tools and libraries to enable an easy to setup and use development environment and automated CI pipelines to support rapid feature releases.
NBA
Senior Engineer
May 2022 – Nov 2022
NBA
Senior Engineer
- Worked as backend engineer on the Data API platform team, responsible for the maintenance and development of the Core Data APIs and serviced used for live in-game data and player stats on NBA.com and televised broadcasts.
- Implemented a new GraphQL API service to replace an existing REST API service, which reduced the number of requests required to retrieve data, and improved the performance of the API by up to 80%.
- Leveraged TypeScript and GraphQL to create a type-safe API client library that was used by the frontend team to consume the API.
- Assisted in creation and launch of NBA League Pass, including the development of services used to stream live game video and statistics.
AppLab
Founder
September 2021 – Current
AppLab
Founder
- Founded AppLab to streamline common and repetitive engineering tasks through 1-Click creation and management of environments, bootstrapping of application and services projects, automating the creation and management of infrastructure, and supporting data-driven business growth via user analytics, UX experiments, and customer outreach tools.
- Authored over 30 open-source libraries, including a CLI tool to compile TypeScript apps, services, and libraries to ESM with support for code splitting, tree shaking, and CJS/UMD for backward compatibility. It also transpiles data models and generates type definitions, Redux state logic, an HTTP client, Sequelize models, and an API server with CRUD endpoints to automate the creation and management of the application/data state independent from the view layer.
- Created tooling and deployment pipelines to automate secret management and injection, DNS management, CDN caching/invalidation, and user authentication.
- Built template repositories for the rapid creation of Machine Learning services, Web Socket servers, APIs, Webhook handlers, and other common types of backend services.
Nike
Senior Engineer III
July 2019 – September 2021
Nike
Senior Engineer III
- Frontend engineer using Typescript and React.js to build Machine Learning-driven chat application on the Twilio platform used by the “Nike Experts on Demand” team to support and engage high-value customers.
- Leveraged "CSS-in-JS" libraries such as styled-components to construct responsive, pixel-perfect UI components from Figma designs provided by the design team. Used extensive knowledge of CSS to achieve smooth, high-quality UX and animations.
- Worked closely with backend and mobile teams to design solutions, define contracts, and prioritize sprint work.
- Authored unit tests using Mocha/Chai, component rendering assertions using Jest and react-testing-library, and functional tests with Cypress.
- Maintained highly-effective relationships with the Product Owner and larger business organization to refine and prioritize stories in the product backlog, resolve design anomalies or external dependencies, and validate business hypotheses via A/B experiments.
Nike
Lead Engineer
May 2016 – February 2019
Nike
Lead Engineer
- Led a team of three engineers on a project to redesign and migrate the Nike customer support sites off the Oracle CX Customer Portal platform to a single AWS cloud-hosted Web application written in React.js.
- Collaborated closely with the Product Owner to create and refine stories in the product backlog, ensured tech debt was captured and prioritized, managed inter-team dependencies, and mentored junior engineers.
- Tasked with migrating 48 separate code bases written in PHP, with no source control, or unit testing, and changes had to be manually uploaded to the Web server via WebDAV; to a Node.js project with source control, and Jenkins CI/CD pipelines that ran had stages for running tests, bundling code and deployment to AWS ECS Fargate services.
- Successfully converted and unified Get Help sites into a single Git repository with 70% code coverage, localization, and internationalization built-in, and deployment pipelines that saved hundreds of developer hours.
Oracle
Site Architect
May 2012 – May 2016
Oracle
Site Architect
- Built consumer-facing customer service and support sites using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP/CodeIgniter on the Oracle RightNow CX platform, to demonstrate the product’s features and functionality to prospective customers.
- I worked in the sales organization, building product sales demo sites according to requirements provided by Solution Consultants.