Hi, I’m Steve. I’m a Distinguished Engineer at Intuit, working on QuickBooks, with a focus on Developer Velocity and AI, distributed systems architecture, and creating frameworks to make developer’s lives easier.
I live in Southern California now, out near Palm Springs, but I am originally from the UK. I was actually born in West London, very close to where Ted Lasso is set. I’ve also spent quite a few years in North Wales (in the UK), Texas, Arizona, and Washington (State), so my accent is wonky.
I am a builder — I always have been. I find a problem, and I don’t rest until I have an elegant solution. Elegant can take many forms, but for me it often means creating frameworks that make it easy to do something that was previously hard. Often times that takes the form of creating domain-specific languages that make it easy to get results without writing a ton of code.
When I was at Amazon, they use their Leadership Principles to define what they think your “superpowers” are, and for me it was Think Big. A lot of times I’m living a year in the future, thinking about problems the team doesn’t even know it has yet, which gives me time to help them avoid pitfalls. But it also means I have to spend time explaining things that don’t always seem obvious to the rest of the team.
I also used to tell people that my personal motto was “if you see me running, try and keep up!”, but over time I’ve come to understand there’s no point running if you’re not following me. Maybe I’ve mellowed!
In my day job I’m mostly using using Kotlin, and some Java. I would say Kotlin is my favorite language of any I’ve used a lot — I’m impressed that they were able to make a language that was expressive enough to make you highly productive, while still making it highly readable and fun to write.
Prior to that it was a mix of C#, Java, and TypeScript, but I’ve also done Python and straight javascript along the way. I went back to C# to re-create XSP, and after using Kotlin I find C# really clunky. I think it’t all the semicolons, but also the lambda syntax in C#.
I was doing XML in the very early days, even before it came to be used in web services. In 1997 I was working on a few shareware Windows applications, and wanted them to exchange data. I started out with a text format based on Microsoft’s Regedit text format (similar to YAML), but it had limitations. Then I found XML, but I couldn't find any parsers, so I wrote my own. About a year later I was interviewing at Dell, and they wanted to use XML to re-do the Dell Europe website. I was the first person they’d talked to that had even heard of XML.
I ended up writing a scripting language called XSP where the scripts themselves were written in XML. We then used that to support Dell.com in Europe in 22 countries. XSP had an interesting content inheritance model that let you manage a large number of countries but only localizing what you wanted to. This was very popular with the business, and in 1999 we rolled it out to support the website globally in 85 countries.
I have an updated version of that script engine on my GitHub. And in the spirit of “eating your own dogfood”, this site was built with that engine. The original engine did quite a bit more, but this version is orders of magnitude faster (this page executed in 7.169ms) ... The benefit of 25 years advancement in technology (and my ability, I guess).
Proof: this is the unstyled output of the page script
More proof: this is the execution trace.
Also, did you notice what happens when you refresh the page? Just in case you didn’t think there was a script running the page 😉
One fun thing about XSP ... In late 1998 I showed what I was working on to some folks at Microsoft, as I was encountering a lot of stress bugs in MSXML.DLL (the parser/XSL processor I was using at that time). They were giving each other furtive glances, and one said “is this that XSP?”. “No, he made his own!”. It turned out there was effort inside Microsoft to create their own XSP to replace Classic ASP, where they were basically adding XSL constructs to Classic ASP. We got connected, and I showed the XSP team what I was working on. I don’t know exactly what happened next, but about a month later they scrapped what they were doing, and ASP.NET was born.
There were quite a few similarities — the idea of creating an intermediate hierarchy of nodes, then rendering it. In XSP that was an intermediate XML document, and in ASP.NET 1.0 it was the Control hierarchy. XSP also created a hierarchical trace so you could see what it was doing, and where, and ASP.NET 1.0 had basically the same thing.
One thing ASP.NET 1.0 didn’t do was borrow XSP’s functional override mechanism. In XSP script support inheritance, so when you are building up a webpage, you can override a base method to change the content in a section on a page. This enables the base page to act like an overridable template. There was no easy way to do this in ASP.NET 1.0, but ASP.NET 2.0 introduced Master Pages that let you achieve the same thing. Of course, XSP had been doing that for 7 years by then!
Execution time: 7.169ms
