Steve Purcell
Principal Engineer at LocalStack
Ireland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inEmacs and Lisp Development Environment
Steve Purcell is a principal engineer and serial founder with 25 years of multi‑disciplinary software experience, combining hands‑on engineering, product instincts and executive leadership up to CTO/VP scale. He builds high‑trust, low‑overhead organisations and has led and grown engineering organisations of 80+ while also shipping influential open‑source tooling and platform work. A prolific Emacs and developer‑tool contributor (notably to Flycheck, Magit, MELPA and many language modes), he brings deep familiarity with language tooling, LSP integrations and reproducible builds. His career spans startups, consulting and product businesses where he consistently reduces operating costs and technical risk while accelerating delivery. Based in Ireland, he pairs a people‑first leadership style with a technologist’s taste for simple, effective systems and a long track record of anticipating industry trends. An unusual strength is alternating between strategic leadership and hands‑on authoring of widely used open‑source developer infrastructure.
25 years of coding experience
29 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree Theoretical Physics, Bachelor's Degree Theoretical Physics at Lancaster University
English, German, French, Spanish
Stackoverflow
15,122reputation
725kreached
138answers
0questions
jetty
top-5%
bash
top-5%
emacs
top-1%
clojure
top-5%
elisp
top-5%
cygwin
top-5%
Github Skills (84)
ivy10
package-management10
python10
nix10
racket10
command-line-interface10
accounting10
language-server-protocol10
build-automation10
nrepl10
syntax-checking10
haskell10
javascript10
formatter10
formater10
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
melpa/melpa
Jan 2012 - Oct 2022
Recipes and build machinery for the biggest Emacs package repo
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:21 reviews, 4386 commits, 2804 PRs in 10 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Steve primarily worked on the `package-build.el` file within the `melpa/melpa` repository. Their contributions involved fixing docstrings, supporting wildcard functionality in the :files option, and refactoring build-checkout functions to directly access configuration options. They also improved the code for generating the HTML package index.
elispmachineryrecipesbiggestemacs-package
purcell/exec-path-from-shell
Sep 2012 - Sep 2022
Make Emacs use the $PATH set up by the user's shell
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 93 commits, 18 PRs in 10 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Steve primarily focused on enhancing the Emacs configuration to utilize the user's shell environment variables. Their contributions involved adding new features like autoload cookies and making the list of copied variables customizable. They also refactored the code to set all variables with a single shell invocation, improving efficiency. The user's work included ensuring proper environment variable handling for various shells, including tcsh, and addressing null character escaping.
set-upemacsemacs-lspshellmelpa
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