Hi, I'm Stephen!
I absolutely love building things, I love continuing to care for and improve them even more :) Over the past 9 years I’ve had the privilege of learning the ins and outs of full stack software development, design and dev ops. This skillset has unlocked endless possibilities to shape online experiences that are pleasing to use, which has quickly become my favorite thing in the world to do. If you’d like to learn more about my programming journey (Amongst other mostly silly anecdotes) just scroll down!
I spent 7 years at Medal, and it was my first software job, first remote job and first startup all at once! I helped build the desktop and web apps used by millions of gamers to capture and share their clips, and got to lead entire projects from a rough idea all the way to production. Along the way I learned to dig into user behavior data to figure out what actually mattered, and to ship features that made people want to stick around.
Alt Church is my side project and a hopeful future passion to bring a 100% transparent non-profit backed suite of software to users at the lowest possible cost. It is in a pre-alpha state with only a couple friends having full access. You can however poke around in guest mode and check out the 8 apps that are currently live. There is also a react-native app that is in alpha and work has started on the desktop app as well.
Mentoring
When I first started to learn software development back in 2017, I was mentored by a close friend for almost 2 years before I secured my first job at Medal. While at Medal I had the opportunity to mentor Hunter and Juan in the way I was mentored and helped both of them secure full time engineering positions at Medal.
Since I was very young, my favorite hobby has always been music. Chelsey and I’s living room is a band room with a full sound system, guitars, piano, drums and a variety of other instruments. I host jam sessions with friends at our house regularly and I also really love Karaoke. My favorite musical era is blues rock from the 60’s / 70’s and I am actively trying to improve my skills at both blues improvisation on the guitar and jazz on the piano.
Cat Dad
Chelsey and I have two wonderful kitty babies, Cheese and Moe. Moe loves to sit by the window and watch our neighborhood squirrels eat Walnuts or spread out in front of the fire and get toasty. Cheese loves to curl up next to me while I work or meow insatiably at me until I follow him into his favorite bedroom so he can flop and receive affection. Both of them love to wander outside on their leashes and take in nature, both of them lose their minds for Churu <3
Nature
Chelsey and I are very blessed to have a small rambler on the backside of McCollum Park in Mill Creek, Wa. There are majestic Cedar and Spruce trees surrounding our home and most homes in the neighborhood. We have a wonderful quarter acre piece of land that sure does keep us busy. We transformed the front yard two years ago to remove over a dozen stumps, bring in a bunch of soil and lay fresh grass <3 We still have a lot of work to realize it’s full potential but it is so much nicer than it was already :)