About

I'm Steven Holdsworth, @holsee online, an increasingly grey-bearded engineer and software architect in Northern Ireland, working remotely primarily across the UK and EU. I graduated from Queen's University Belfast in 2009 with an honours degree in Computer Science, having taken employment through university shipping code, so I started the full-time game with a couple of years of professional engineering under my belt.

My arc. A placement year at a secure electronic documents and records management company that was acquired mid-placement; a summer on a magnetic-tape system in a baltic server room at a bank, where I found a UNIX book and scripted away everything other than loading the tapes; a 3D interface for a multi-room media centre; then self-employed at twenty-two, building high-performance systems and tools for black-box and algorithmic trading for a private trading fund, mostly remote. A year consulting inside a bank's architecture division, then two years on US-healthcare services and mobile platforms, and two more on a commodities exchange's trading platform and its market-analysis systems. In 2015 I joined a cyber-security firm to write Erlang for a living, on a packet-and-log processing platform for cyber-attack incident detection, and then designing and implementing its serverless successor. Since late 2017 I've been a Dad and working in ed-tech, where I've originated and architected the AI platform and multiple data platforms, including traditional predictive analytics and AI intelligence systems, built the exam-systems services and a coaching marketplace, and been part of a small crack unit solving the hardest problems and providing strategic advice for the best part of a decade. My timeline has almost every position, project, talk and library that I can disclose (/remember), dated; the CV is the short form.

Community. Working remote as much as I have, I really enjoy community engagement and helping to grow the Belfast meet-up scene as much as time affords; Belfast, NI, is full of brilliant engineers. I organise the Belfast Elixir and Belfast Functional Programming meet-ups. Years ago I helped run the Northern Ireland Microsoft Technology User Group and, with a friend, put on Super Happy Dev Castle, a 24-hour hackathon for local technologists who wanted something that wasn't tied to one vendor. I've given talks at ElixirConf EU on 3D visualisation of processes, at Functional Kats Conf in Dublin on building neural networks and the maths behind crafting your first neuron, and at too many Belfast meet-ups to list, and in 2019 my project won Spawnfest, the BEAM community's 48-hour hackathon, with a schemaless realtime database of my design.

Open source. chroxy, spirit_fingers, Cherry (the static site generator this site runs on), cherrypicker, agent frameworks, data ontology systems: the list goes on, so check out my GitHub to see what I'm up to and what I've been able to share to date. I've also contributed to open_api_spex, gen_magic, ex_aws_bedrock, ex_aws_s3 and pow, to name a few libraries you might have used in the Elixir space, and my packages are on hex.pm.

Education, beyond the degree. A week-long Advanced Erlang and OTP course with Robert Virding at Erlang Solutions; a course on high-performance lock-free data structures for high-throughput concurrency taught by Martin Thompson; and Coursera certifications in reactive programming and functional programming in Scala from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), taught by Martin Odersky (with Erik Meijer and Roland Kuhn on the reactive course), from the years when everything I built was reactive. To name but a few which have been formative, and allowed me to meet and talk shop with some of my programming heroes.

If you want the detail, my timeline lays out the positions, projects, talks and libraries in date order, and the CV is the short version built from the same files, and the blog has the write-ups.