👋 Hi, I’m Steven

Welcome to my GitHub!

I'm a Principal Software Engineer with 15+ years of professional experience designing scalable, fault-tolerant, and maintainable systems. I've worked across startups, scale-ups, and enterprise environments — always with a deep focus on enabling teams, mentoring others, and reducing long-term technical costs.

🛠��� What I Do

• Architect cloud-native and event-driven systems using Scala, ZIO, Kafka, Golang, and AWS.
• Lead complex initiatives around system design, GraphQL services, data pipelines, and resiliency.
• Mentor engineers in functional programming, architecture, and software craftsmanship.
• Speak at user groups and internal tech talks on streaming architectures, testing, and functional design.
• Build open-source tools and write architectural decision records that scale with the org.

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🔍 Projects Worth a Look

• 📚 Awesome Kafka — A curated list of Kafka resources I maintain for engineers diving into event streaming.
• 📢 Meetup Broadcaster — Scala service that monitors Meetup events and broadcasts to Twitter/Reddit.
• 📈 Financial Market Strategy Simulator — Backtesting engine for trading strategies with concurrent java code and visualizations.
• 📘 Cross-Platform Ebook Library — Aggregation, scraping, and clustering for smarter indexing. (Java)
• 🌐 404Browser — A popular web browser I released in the early 2000s, downloaded over 100k times. (Visual C++)

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🧠 What I Talk About

• Kafka Streams – Architecture, real-world use cases, and POCs.
• Refactoring Monoliths – Pragmatic approaches beyond microservices.
• GraphQL with Caliban – Walkthroughs and real-world usage.
• Digital Ownership & Privacy – Facilitated discussions at jCrete.
• Testing Practices – From Spock to ScalaTest and everything in between.

See more of my speaking and writing on my blog.

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⚡ Fun Wins & Highlights

• Reduced AWS spend from $50k+ to $8/year by refactoring a health rewards pipeline.
• Launched a production-ready GraphQL service in 2 months, improving integration time from 3 months to 3 days.
• Decreased urgent developer support calls on a large pipeline from 26/year to 2/year through improvements to resiliency and load management.
• Cut memory usage of core services by 90%+ through profiling and tuning.

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📫 Connect With Me

• 📍 Chicago, IL
• 🔗 LinkedIn
• 🧠 Blog – Insights on systems, Scala, and engineering culture.

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“Code is more than syntax — it’s a reflection of the systems we build and the teams we shape.”

Thanks for stopping by — feel free to open an issue, follow along, or just say hi!