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I'm Steven Skoczen.

Welcome to my résumé.

Skills

Best ever
Awesome
Solid
Novice
7
Leadership
6
Mentorship
8
Processes
7
UX
6
UI
4
Design
8
Front-end
8
Back-end
7
Devops & Automation
3
DBA
3
Server Admin
7
Project Management
8
Architecture

I love making things that make the world better.

I've been programming for 20+ years, and am a full-stack developer in the broadest possible sense. Front-end, back-end, everything from UX to system architecture, I've done it all over the years, and I'm pretty decent at all of it. I've also led and grown teams across a wide variety of contexts: small bootstrapped startups, established firms, academia, and large governmental organizations.

These days, I'm happiest coding in python and javascript, using robust and mature frameworks. (Django and Vue are my favorites, but I can use anything.) I love building tools for the dev team, mentoring, architecting our stack and schemas, and designing for scale.

I am deeply passionate about understanding the user, figuring out their journey, and how what we're building can make their day, month, and life better. But most of all, I just love getting things done. I love jumping in, knocking tasks out quickly and done right the first time. I'm experienced managing projects from small to year-long mammoths, and good at scoping, understanding the business needs, and making tradeoffs to get things shipped.

I'm looking for interesting problems and smart, smart people to work with. I want to learn things and teach things, but most of all - make things. Good things. Things that make some human somewhere really happy.

It might be that my next place is with you. Let's talk, and find out!

Experience

I've been lucky to found, work at, and work with some amazing companies. Most recently, that's:

BuddyUp
Co-Founder, CTO
Grew the team from two to six, architected and coded iOS, Android, and web apps built in ionic. Created a platform that handled super-spikey demand at scale with large, real-time chat rooms, and all the stuff you'd expect with a good mobile app. More than the technical achievements, I'm most proud of the healthy, whole-person remote culture we were able to create together.
Ink and Feet
Founder
Ink and Feet was a radical reinvention of my career in which I worked primarily a writer and coach, and secondarily as an app developer. I've been fortunate to coach some amazing, world-changing people, and make a few courses and a book with genuine value and impact. I've also been lucky to work as a digital nomad, living across the planet and experiencing a vast array of cultures and beliefs, and languages.
GreenKahuna
Senior Engineer, Dev Team Lead
Took a team of fresh, talented developers and made app-making warriors. Built an open dev culture, with monthly kick-backs to iterate how we worked. Architected, led code reviews, and moved us from minimal testing to continuous deployment on E2E tests. Wrote and open-sourced will, our chat bot that handled devops, workflow, and fun.
Building Energy
Senior Engineer
Designed a decoupled pub-sub application architecture, and built it in a few weeks. Built the deploy system, a generalized data importer, Yeti, an amazingly helpful and friendly bot, and Flint, a dev-facing command-line tool. Drove culture from no tests to functional coverage and unit tests on all new code.
Wieden+Kennedy
Creative Technical Lead
Pushed creative digital thinking on the Coke, Laika, and Nike Golf accounts. Worked on a P&G global campaign, helped conceptualize and code the ParaNorman campaign, and watched my work in that year's Super Bowl. Started a monthly Tech Breakfast series to keep creatives current with the latest tech trends.
GoodCloud
Co-Founder, CEO
Built a full-featured CRM, donor and volunteer management platform for small nonprofits in four months, with one hand tied behind my back at a day job. Open-sourced a number of libraries from the codebase. Made some small nonprofits very happy.

I've also led medical research, founded a handful of companies, written a book, and given a TEDx talk. Weirdly, my degree is in Environmental Engineering from Cornell. Another lifetime ago, I wrote the International Ethobotany Database, after two summers in Perú interviewing shamans. It's been an interesting ride.

Code

I've created over a dozen open-source libraries, including some fairly popular ones. Here are some favorites, and my github:

Will
git.io/vynMM
Polytester
git.io/vylhO
Django-seo-js
git.io/vylhY
My Github
github.com/skoczen
Salad
github.com/salad
GoodCloud
github.com/goodcloud

Visa and Citizenship

I'm a United States citizen, and also have permanent residency in New Zealand, and can accept contracts in both places. More generally, I'm generally a digital nomad, and I strongly prefer remote work at this point in my life.