Steve Sloan is a seasoned Lead Systems Engineer with 20 years of experience designing and operating scalable, secure systems across startups and enterprise environments from Seattle. He has deep full-stack expertise—especially Ruby on Rails back-ends, Kafka-based service architectures, and Kubernetes deployments on AWS—and a history of taking products from MVP to high-availability production (notably at Record360 and Apptentive). Steve’s background spans embedded and systems-level work (device drivers, DSP, and C/C++) through modern cloud infrastructure, giving him an uncommon ability to bridge low-level performance needs with high-level distributed design. An active open-source contributor, he improved key Ruby EventMachine libraries to add fiber-aware I/O and robust HTTP features, reflecting a focus on reliability and developer ergonomics. He mentors engineering teams, sharpens development processes, and consistently delivers pragmatic, observable systems that scale.
20 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
A.A. Computer Science, A.A. Computer Science at Spokane Falls Community College
B.S. Electrical Engineering/Computer Science, B.S. Electrical Engineering/Computer Science at Washington State University
Contributions:9 commits, 3 PRs, 1 push in 7 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Steve contributed to the development of the `em-http-request` library, enhancing its functionality and improving its usability. They added support for features like Bundler, request body streaming from IO objects, and setting body string encoding. Additionally, they addressed parsing of the "100 Continue" response and introduced tests to ensure the reliability and proper operation of these new features.
Fiber aware EventMachine clients and convenience classes
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:16 commits in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Steve primarily contributed to the `em-synchrony` library, focusing on integrating EventMachine with fiber-based concurrency. Their work included adding fiber-aware replacements for standard Ruby classes like TCPSocket, Mutex, and ConditionVariable. The user also added support for Mongoid, adapting it to use the library's fiber-aware components. Furthermore, they implemented error handling, non-blocking writes, and added tests to improve the robustness of the TCPSocket implementation.
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