Steve Howell
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteve Howell is a seasoned backend software engineer based in Seattle with over 20 years building production systems across e-commerce, media, and infrastructure. He has held engineering roles at Amazon (AmazonFresh), RealNetworks, DomainTools, Zulip (acquired by Dropbox) and Dropbox, bringing deep experience in Python and C++ and a track record of shipping reliable services. An active open-source contributor, he made significant backend and API contributions to the popular Zulip chat project and the python-zulip-api—adding bot frameworks, a Groovy Jira client, virtual filesystem support for bots, and performance-focused refactors around streams and subscriptions. Steve combines hands-on engineering with production support instincts for deployments, troubleshooting, and payment gateway operations, favouring pragmatic solutions that simplify complexity. A Duke BS graduate, he’s equally comfortable optimizing message pipelines and building developer-facing tooling that helps teams operate at scale.
12 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BS, BS at Duke University
Stackoverflow
422reputation
29kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (18)
api-doc10
back-end-development10
python10
django10
bots10
zulip10
api10
django210
message-system9
message-queue9
data-processing9
performance-optimization9
message-driven9
message-bus9
django-templates6
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
zulip/zulip
Apr 2013 - Apr 2022
Zulip server and web application. Open-source team chat that helps teams stay productive and focused.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:311 reviews, 5627 commits, 2352 PRs in 9 years
Contributions summary:Steve's commits primarily focused on refactoring and optimizing the Zulip server application's back-end code, specifically within the context of stream management and user subscriptions. They modified code related to stream data, subscribers, and message processing, aiming to simplify and improve performance. Additionally, the user also worked on the API and system for managing webhooks.
pythonweb-applicationcollaborationzulipjavascript
zulip/python-zulip-api
Aug 2013 - Oct 2020
Python library for the Zulip API.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:100 commits, 195 PRs, 171 pushes in 7 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Steve primarily contributed to the `python-zulip-api` repository by implementing and expanding features related to bot functionality within the Zulip ecosystem. They added a Groovy client integration for the Jira, implemented a Python script to summarize stream data, and created example bots with associated library infrastructure. Their commits demonstrate the creation of virtual file system capabilities for the bots. The user also simplified and fixed existing API code.
python-libraryapipythonpypizulip
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