Steven Hartland
VP Of Engineering at Rocket Science
Greater Southampton Area United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteven Hartland is a seasoned VP of Engineering with 22 years building high-performance, high-volume systems across gaming and live entertainment, currently leading engineering at Rocket Science after senior technical leadership roles at Unity and Multiplay. He specialises in game server architecture, query protocol design, and database and architecture optimisation, with deep experience making titles GSP and e-sports ready. A hands-on engineer at heart, he has made meaningful open-source contributions to major Go projects and runtimes—including golang, redigo, runc—and to widely used gaming server tooling like TShock and Bukkit. Steven combines strategic product leadership with low-level systems fixes (e.g., net/http, multipart, runtime and container handling), which lets him bridge research, production reliability, and developer tooling. Based in Greater Southampton, he pairs an Imperial College MEng in Computer Science with a track record of scaling live services and fixing subtle concurrency and protocol issues under real-world load.
22 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
MEng, Computer Science, MEng, Computer Science at Imperial College London
English
Stackoverflow
11reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (58)
debugging10
apim10
api-rest10
reflection10
programming-language10
debug10
minecraft-forge10
docker10
container10
event-handling10
redis10
api-design10
restful-api10
testing10
plugin-development10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
robertkrimen/otto
Feb 2015 - Jan 2023
A JavaScript interpreter in Go (golang)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 71 reviews, 69 commits in 8 years
Contributions summary:Steven significantly contributed to the `robertkrimen/otto` project by implementing features that enhance the Go-based JavaScript interpreter. They added support for Go functions returning multiple values by representing them as an array, facilitating the use of destructuring assignments. Furthermore, the user fixed argument processing issues within function calls and implemented automatic numeric parameter conversion. They also improved array handling by exporting arrays to a common type when possible, and added support for pushing elements into go slices.
golangjavascriptinterpreterjavascript-interpreter
gomodule/redigo
Mar 2016 - Jul 2022
Go client for Redis
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 releases, 74 reviews, 29 commits in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Steven focused on enhancing the functionality of the Go client for Redis by implementing custom argument and scan handling. They added the ability for types to control how their values are represented when used in Redis commands and how they are scanned from Redis. These changes included adding interfaces for Argument and Scanner, and updating tests to validate the new functionalities. Furthermore, they enabled keep-alive on server connections and added wait statistics to pools for connection tracking and debugging.
golanggo-clientredisredis-clientgo
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