Steven Burnett
Software Engineer at CASE
Springfield, Virginia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteven Burnett is a versatile software engineer with 15 years of experience blending back-end development, DevOps, and release automation for robotics and ROS ecosystems. Based in Springfield, VA, he has made notable open-source contributions to high-profile projects like Drake and multiple core ROS 2 libraries (rcl, rclcpp, rclpy), where he focused on build systems, dependency management, action clients, and CI/CD improvements. His career bridges scientific R&D and engineering—he holds a PhD in Chemistry and has led product development and inventory management efforts in biotech and AgTech, bringing rigorous experimental thinking to software problems. Steven routinely improves developer experience by removing fragile dependencies, automating releases, and hardening cross-language client libraries. He also writes clear technical documentation and release notes, making complex systems more accessible to users and integrators. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic problem-solver who quietly haunts legacy build systems until they behave.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Santa Monica CollegeDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Chemistry, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Chemistry at Howard UniversityBS Chemistry, BS Chemistry at University of Hawaii at Manoa
Stackoverflow
455reputation
245kreached
15answers
0questions
Github Skills (64)
dependency-management10
git10
change-tracking10
debug10
c-language10
package-management10
rc10
python10
sphinx10
testing10
build-system10
cmake10
cicd10
release-management10
changelog10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
ros-infrastructure/rosdep
Nov 2018 - May 2022
rosdep multi-package manager system dependency tool
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Release Manager
Backend Developer & Release ManagerContributions:79 reviews, 27 commits, 73 PRs in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Steven primarily contributed to the `rosdep` project by implementing features and fixing bugs related to dependency management and package installation for the ROS ecosystem. Their contributions include improving cache handling for Python 2 and 3 compatibility, updating the codebase to use newer Python features, and modifying the build and release process by bumping versions and modifying configuration files. They also added features to the release process and automated more tests to ensure the quality of the project.
manager-systemmulti-packagepackage-manager
ros2/examples
Oct 2018 - Nov 2020
Example packages for ROS 2
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 5 PRs, 12 pushes in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Steven primarily contributed to the `examples` repository by modifying and adding changelog entries across multiple sub-projects within the ROS 2 ecosystem. Their work involved updating version numbers, adding new changelog entries to detail recent changes, and updating setup files. The user also introduced action examples for rclcpp and rclpy, adding changelog for those packages and updating the overall version of the examples.
roboticsrosros2
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