I'm Stephen Souness, a professional software developer based in Christchurch, New Zealand.
I live lived and worked in London, UK for over a decade from the financial crisis of 2008 through Brexit and Covid. I gained a lot of hands on experience with back end technologies, including designing, developing, and deploying microservices into cloud environments starting off with CloudFoundry, then EC2 and ECS on AWS and even some Mesos along the way.
Over the course of my career I have utilised a range of database technologies, from relational databases such as MS SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL to NoSQL databases including MarkLogic, HBase and DynamoDB.
I am a firm believer in using the right technology for the right reasons, not just going with what is the most familiar or what might stand out on my CV.
Since about 2015 most of my work projects have involved asynchronous processing of data, applying AWS SQS or Apache Kafka to capture the raw data and make it available for applying business logic and responding to queries in data sources.
My GitHub contributions history mainly reflects when my employers have or have not been using GitHub as their preferred source code host, so 2020 through to 2021 isn't the only time that I've been committing code!
I was one of the 1600 or so caught up in the Atlassian redundancies of March 2026 so am on the lookout for something new to work on.
My main tech blog: https://blog.sounie.nz/