About Me

If you’re pressed for time, feel free to jump straight to my resume. Otherwise, here’s a bit about who I am beyond the code.

Personal Life Link to heading

Greetings,

I am Steven, a forty-something husband, father of 2 monsters… I mean lovely children, occasional author, technophile, and software engineer with over 20 years of experience.

My interests span beyond the world of software engineering. I’m an avid gamer, reader, writer, and enthusiast of astronomy, photography, and drawing, just to scratch the surface.

I started programming around 1990 in GW-BASIC on a Tandy 1000 running DOS and Deskmate. From there it was QBASIC, batch scripts, and eventually Visual Basic in high school. By the late 90s I had picked up HTML, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL, which became the foundation of my professional career.

After high school, I didn’t immediately dive into Software Engineering. I spent five years in security, during which I obtained my EMT License. This experience has notably shaped my ‘security-first’ approach in software development.

Professional Life Link to heading

From 2005 to 2015, I ventured into the world of consulting, providing IT services independently. I worked with numerous companies, including Gurus2Go, Barrister, Tier3 Support, and Accolade Support, Advance Health, among others. My roles were diverse, encompassing Help Desk services, WordPress plugin development, and crafting websites and communication systems with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. It was during this early part of my career I found Twilio and realized my love of developing communication systems.

From 2015 to 2022, I joined Smart Sales, a furniture leasing company, eventually leading their entire IT department. In a small company, versatility is key, and my role was approximately 75% Software Engineering, 20% Management, and 5% Help Desk. I led a nimble team of three engineers and managed our transition from costly, outage-prone dedicated servers to a more reliable, cost-effective AWS setup across multiple availability zones, cutting costs by over 60%. I spearheaded the revamp of the company’s CRM, call center, and customer portal, and designed an innovative browser-based WebRTC system for high-quality remote call recording with DVR capabilities. I remained committed to the company until its closure due to industry shifts post-COVID.

In 2023, I joined CallPotential as a founding engineer on their AI Agent team. I transitioned to C# and DynamoDB, applying domain-driven design to build a real-time, voice-driven AI agent for customer phone interactions. The project drew on my background in audio transmuxing, web sockets, and Twilio voice to deliver low-latency conversational experiences in production. When CallPotential was acquired by Storable in 2024, I shifted into the core engineering team to support backend modernization across NestJS microservices and legacy PHP systems.

In March 2025, I took on the role of Principal Engineer at Smart Technologies (DailyStream.com), where I lead technical strategy and system redesign. I am the inventor of the remote workstation capture and viewing technology that underpins the platform, covered by US Patent 12,282,881 (assigned to and owned by the company). I architected a serverless migration from Node.js/EC2 to Go on AWS Lambda, scaling capacity to 100M+ monthly requests while cutting compute infrastructure costs by over 99%. I also engineered a custom Go-based Windows recording agent, optimized for resource-constrained thin clients, that pipes in-memory frames directly to FFmpeg with hardware acceleration to eliminate disk I/O bottlenecks.

Language Learning Link to heading

Following the principles of The Pragmatic Programmer, learning a new language each year has been a long-standing practice of mine. Some are aimed at professional use, others at expanding how I think about problems. My current stack and the languages I am exploring next are on the stack page.

Conclusion Link to heading

Well if you took the time to listen to me go on about my personal life and who I am professionally I hope you enjoyed it. Please head over to the blog to see my thoughts on various tech issues.