Steve Phillips is an award-winning founder and privacy-focused software engineer with 15+ years building secure, distributed systems and privacy-preserving apps from San Francisco. He's launched and led projects like LeapChat (47k+ ephemeral rooms), the Digital Safe for domestic abuse survivors (winner of international innovation awards including the Swiss Future Prize), and Relay Anonymous Messenger—a decentralized, Tor-embedded, Signal-like system that supports unlimited file transfers. Comfortable across Go, Python, and modern JS frameworks, he architects concurrent microservices, encryption-first APIs, and self-hostable tooling for developers and end users alike. An inventive cryptographer, he created CrypTag—searchable encrypted tags presented at DEF CON—and continues to prototype radical privacy UX such as anonymous, self-hostable messaging and LLM-powered news summarization (TechBytes.news). He’s also an active open-source contributor and technical writer, improving docs and concurrency fixes for projects like PostgREST and the V language.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Mathematics, Philosophy (double-major), Mathematics, Philosophy (double-major) at UC Santa Barbara
Computer Security, Computer Networking, Computer Science, Computer Security, Computer Networking, Computer Science at Santa Barbara City College
Contributions:8 commits, 6 PRs, 3 comments in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Steve's contributions primarily focused on improving the documentation for the PostgREST project. Their work involved correcting typos, de-duplicating words, adding missing examples, and improving formatting within the API documentation (api.rst) and the authentication documentation (auth.rst). The changes indicate a focus on clarity, accuracy, and completeness of the documentation, making it easier for users to understand and utilize the PostgREST API.
Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:15 reviews, 10 commits, 15 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Steve primarily contributed to the V programming language repository by adding example programs and fixing minor bugs. They added examples for fetching news, generating random IPs, and implementing a FizzBuzz program. Additionally, the user corrected a typo in the array implementation and improved the cgen code to utilize a temporary variable. They also cleaned up and fixed several concurrency-related issues in the `v up` and example files.
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