Home

I am Steve Phillips, a professional developer living in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I've been developing professionally since 2006. I began as a LAMP developer, working with those tools and the related ecosystem of JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Starting in 2011, I began to focus my efforts outside of this stack and explored nodejs and Python. In mid 2012, my job duties switched to firmware and software development and I began to work heavily with the .NET framework for software and C for firmware.

During my time as a web developer, I shifted platforms and techniques numerous times. I've spent significant time with custom built frameworks, as well as Kohana and Drupal. I try to keep up to date on current techniques, and integrated libraries such as Composer and PHPUnit into my software to increase robustness and portability.

As a software developer, I work exclusively with Visual Studio and the .NET 4.0 framework. Much of the existing code is written in VB .NET, although there is occasional C# work to be done.

As a firmware developer, I write C for PIC microprocessors, specifically the PIC18, PIC24 and PIC32 series. At the moment, I only have done released bugfixes and maintenance work and have not yet released significant changes to the firmware.

My development style tends to favor rigid OOP principles with a focus on loose coupling and high cohesion. I am a follower of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Design and frequently apply the patterns in that book to my code to keep it maintainable, reusable and readable. In addition, I often analyze my code through the principles in Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code and refactor as needed to keep my work stable.

I'm a big supporter of the open source community and have released all of my work under the GPL, when I am able to do so. I strongly feel that collaboration and transparency are the foundations of the best projects. I also believe that reinventing the wheel is often foolish and try to rely on community solutions before creating my own.

Active Projects

• A series of XNA games to explore that library.
• A turret, driven by an Arduino controller and a Wii nunchuck, using a Nerf Rayven CS-18 gun.

Past Projects

• Dovetail, a nodejs browser-based space shooter. This has been shelved temporarily while work on Fusion progresses.
• DOMi, an extension of PHP's DOMDocument, DOMXpath and XSLTProcessor aimed at creating XSL driven websites.
• Zearch, a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that was built for the first Zappos API Developer Challenge.
• Visual77.com, my former portfolio site.
• wsilent, a fork of wpilot that aims to be a spiritual successor to Silent Death Online. Rebooted into Dovetail.
• Statepicker, a module for Drupal that creates a new form field type for selecting state / country easily.
• Fusion, a browser based game that is somewhere between Space Invaders and Tower Defense. 
• Indigo, a PHP 5.4 framework
• Team Liquid Greasemonkey Scripts, a set of greasemonkey scripts designed to enhance teamliquid.net in various ways.