Patrick Stephen
Founding Engineer at Sandgarden
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPatrick Stephen is a founding engineer and seasoned software leader with 11 years of experience building resilient backend systems, most recently specializing in Go. He excels at driving down customer-impacting issues and shipping pragmatic product features, having cut escalations by 95% in a prior role while negotiating cross-functional technical direction. Comfortable both leading from the engineer’s seat and mentoring teams, he emphasizes transparency and autonomy as levers for stronger engineering outcomes. An active open-source contributor to Go game engine projects (notably oakmound/oak), he blends systems-level engineering with interests in gamedev and evolutionary computation. Outside engineering he brings an unusual humanities-rich background—advanced language study, academic research, and music/acting—which informs clear technical communication and creative problem framing. Based in Minneapolis, he thrives at the intersection of production-grade reliability and inventive tooling.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
High School, High School at Harbor City International SchoolBachelor's Degree, Computer Science and Classical Studies, 3.5, Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science and Classical Studies, 3.5 at Carleton CollegeUniversity of Minnesota Twin Cities
Greek, German
Stackoverflow
325reputation
9kreached
16answers
0questions
Github Skills (17)
event-handling10
game-engine10
game-dev10
go10
game-development10
windowing9
audio9
testing8
whitespace6
while-loop6
oracle6
mips6
neural-network6
sql6
machine-learning6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
oakmound/oak
Apr 2016 - Jan 2023
A pure Go game engine
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:41 releases, 22 reviews, 1706 commits in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Patrick made several documentation and code changes related to the Go game engine. Their contributions included changes to the internal structure of the engine, modifications related to mouse event handling and the incorporation of a new feature to handle multi-window functionality. In addition, the user added a new implementation for the audio output using the PulseAudio system.
golanggo-gamegamedevpure-go2d
oakmound/grove
Aug 2020 - Aug 2022
Placeholder for oak examples that may have dependencies/assets that would bloat the oak package.
Contributions:1 release, 1 review, 2 PRs in 2 years
assetsdependenciesoak
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