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monksy/README.md

πŸ‘‹ Hi, I’m Steven

Welcome to my GitHub!

I'm a Principal Software Engineer with 15+ years of professional experience designing scalable, fault-tolerant, and maintainable systems. I've worked across startups, scale-ups, and enterprise environments β€” always with a deep focus on enabling teams, mentoring others, and reducing long-term technical costs.

πŸ› οΈ What I Do

  • Architect cloud-native and event-driven systems using Scala, ZIO, Kafka, Golang, and AWS.
  • Lead complex initiatives around system design, GraphQL services, data pipelines, and resiliency.
  • Mentor engineers in functional programming, architecture, and software craftsmanship.
  • Speak at user groups and internal tech talks on streaming architectures, testing, and functional design.
  • Build open-source tools and write architectural decision records that scale with the org.

πŸ” Projects Worth a Look

  • πŸ“š Awesome Kafka β€” A curated list of Kafka resources I maintain for engineers diving into event streaming.
  • πŸ“’ Meetup Broadcaster β€” Scala service that monitors Meetup events and broadcasts to Twitter/Reddit.
  • πŸ“ˆ Financial Market Strategy Simulator β€” Backtesting engine for trading strategies with concurrent java code and visualizations.
  • πŸ“˜ Cross-Platform Ebook Library β€” Aggregation, scraping, and clustering for smarter indexing. (Java)
  • 🌐 404Browser β€” A popular web browser I released in the early 2000s, downloaded over 100k times. (Visual C++)

🧠 What I Talk About

  • Kafka Streams – Architecture, real-world use cases, and POCs.
  • Refactoring Monoliths – Pragmatic approaches beyond microservices.
  • GraphQL with Caliban – Walkthroughs and real-world usage.
  • Digital Ownership & Privacy – Facilitated discussions at jCrete.
  • Testing Practices – From Spock to ScalaTest and everything in between.

See more of my speaking and writing on my blog.


⚑ Fun Wins & Highlights

  • Reduced AWS spend from $50k+ to $8/year by refactoring a health rewards pipeline.
  • Launched a production-ready GraphQL service in 2 months, improving integration time from 3 months to 3 days.
  • Decreased urgent developer support calls on a large pipeline from 26/year to 2/year through improvements to resiliency and load management.
  • Cut memory usage of core services by 90%+ through profiling and tuning.

πŸ“« Connect With Me

  • πŸ“ Chicago, IL
  • πŸ”— LinkedIn
  • 🧠 Blog – Insights on systems, Scala, and engineering culture.

β€œCode is more than syntax β€” it’s a reflection of the systems we build and the teams we shape.”

Thanks for stopping by β€” feel free to open an issue, follow along, or just say hi!

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