Stephen Kao
Software Engineer at Substack
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolStephen Kao is a senior software engineer based in New York with 11 years of experience building front-end-focused web applications and resilient back-end services. He blends a designer’s eye—favoring pixel-perfect UI/UX and handcrafted implementations—with pragmatic engineering across JavaScript, CSS, HTML/SVG, PHP, SQL/MongoDB, and languages like Java and C++. His career spans roles at Mozilla, Nava, and Good Dog, where he led and shipped production systems while preferring to avoid heavy frameworks in favor of custom-built solutions. A lifelong learner with an early interest in linguistics and game development, he brings curiosity and meticulousness to both UX details and architecture. He’s comfortable across the stack, contributes thoughtfully to code and design decisions, and often prefers building components from scratch to better understand and control their behavior.
11 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Chinese, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Chinese at University of Pittsburgh
English, Chinese
Stackoverflow
209reputation
10kreached
1answer
9questions
Github Skills (76)
css-loader10
hl710
css10
webpack10
webpack-loader10
graphql-request9
react-auth9
chrome-extension9
chrome9
apollo8
frontend8
apollo-client7
devtools7
graphql-client7
cucumber7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
DogParkLabs/Croppie
Jun 2019 - Jul 2020
A Javascript Image Cropper
Contributions:6 PRs, 5 pushes, 6 branches in 1 year 1 month
imagecropjavascriptcropperimage-cropper
stephenkao/stitcher-downloader
May 2018 - Dec 2019
stitcher-downloader
Contributions:4 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 6 months
downloader
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