Steven Parkes
Software Engineer at Snowflake
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSteven Parkes is a seasoned software engineer with 18+ years building distributed systems, data infrastructure, and real-time services across startups and large companies, currently at Snowflake. He combines deep systems-level expertise—contributing bug fixes to LLVM, OpenSSL, libcurl and notable open-source work on EventMachine and Capybara—with hands-on leadership as a former CTO who designed scheduling, CI/CD and observability stacks at Ascend.io. Comfortable across languages and runtimes (Scala, Java, Go, C/C++, Ruby, Python), he prefers pragmatic tool choice over dogma and dives as deep as needed into algorithms and runtimes (most recently a variant of concurrent GC). Based in Palo Alto, his background spans hardware-software projects and academic training (BS/MS/PhD work in electrical engineering), which informs a holistic engineering view. Colleagues describe him as a practical generalist who excels at bringing systems to life rather than pure salesmanship, and who enjoys debugging elusive bugs as much as architecting services.
18 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Electrical Engineering, BS, Electrical Engineering at University of California, DavisUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
English
Stackoverflow
13,957reputation
2.1mreached
285answers
12questions
ios-simulator
top-1%
iphone
top-5%
linker
top-5%
xcode
top-1%
ios
top-5%
Github Skills (26)
c-language10
system-programming10
testing10
test-framework10
inotify10
ruby10
xcode10
event-driven10
eventing10
cprogramming-language10
ios-simulator10
test-automation10
javascript9
ios9
iphone9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
teamcapybara/capybara
Feb 2010 - Jul 2010
Acceptance test framework for web applications
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:8 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Steven's contributions primarily involve modifications and additions to the testing framework of the Capybara project. They implemented and adjusted tests, focusing on features such as external driver support, javascript support, and correct behavior related to redirects. Their work included adapting tests for changes and ensuring that existing tests function as expected after various updates. The user also corrected issues relating to URL handling within the testing framework.
test-framework
eventmachine/eventmachine
Mar 2010 - Apr 2010
EventMachine: fast, simple event-processing library for Ruby programs
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits in 29 days
Contributions summary:Steven contributed to the core functionality of the eventmachine library by addressing issues related to data stream handling, connection timeouts, and callback management. They modified existing code to prevent issues caused by zero-length packets and improve the behavior of the library with regards to resource management and event handling. Their work included updates to the C++ core and the Ruby-based deferrable components, showing a focus on low-level systems programming and event-driven design. Furthermore, the user enhanced the inotify functionality to support directory events and handle long inotify packets.
eventmachineruby
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