Steve Sloan
Lead Systems Engineer at UNLISTED
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteve 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 CollegeB.S., Electrical Engineering/Computer Science, B.S., Electrical Engineering/Computer Science at Washington State University
Stackoverflow
301reputation
27kreached
5answers
0questions
Github Skills (20)
asynchronous10
async10
fibers10
net10
rspec10
http10
networking10
ruby10
eventmachine10
socket10
fiber10
tcp-socket10
concurrency10
hash6
mongodb6
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
igrigorik/em-http-request
Oct 2010 - Aug 2018
Asynchronous HTTP Client (EventMachine + Ruby)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions: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.
asynchronouseventmachinehttp-clientruby
igrigorik/em-synchrony
Jul 2010 - Oct 2011
Fiber aware EventMachine clients and convenience classes
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions: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.
eventmachine
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