Steve Jackson

Portrait of Steve Jackson
Person An icon of a human figure Status
Double Agent
Hash An icon of a hash sign Code Name
Agent 0023
Location An icon of a map marker Location
Houston, TX

His mission

(he chose to accept it)
Get dirty with "impossible" problems to help teams excel
“
Steve continues to see around corners — identifying gaps in our architecture, proposing and implementing new approaches. I couldn’t imagine this project succeeding without his technical leadership.
Chief Product Officer
Clever

Recent Deployments

Heart hands
Unite Us
Education
Clever
Money
Gusto
Smart home
Trane

Tools & Tradecraft

Ruby/Rails

React

Ignoring pull requests

Legacy code archaeology

AWS

Noteworthy Achievements

Establish incident response practices for orgs moving from dozens of engineers to hundreds
Built a data pipeline under an agressive deadline, primarily using Go lambdas and DynamoDB, that makes 12.6M api requests all day, every day
Large zero-downtime rails upgrade efforts (3.2 => 5.1) and (4.2 => 6.0) for large monoliths during heavy active development
Improved build time and stability for monorepo with 200 active engineers (25mins => 7mins)"
Mentoring and pairing with hundreds of developers across dozens of industries

Reports from the Field

  1. How to Date a Gem

    Test Double's agents collaborated on a tool to find out-of-date dependencies to help with a ruby upgrade. Here's a sneak peak of what collaboration looks like at Test Double.
    Time An icon of a clock Publish Date
    July 24, 2023
    Person An icon of a human figure Authors
    Steve Jackson
    Daniel Huss
    Category An icon of a paper organzier Categories
    Ruby
    Upgrades

  3. Humane code reviews

    The best pull request reviews are a communication tool. Demonstrate leadership, establish healthier communication, and create stronger relationships with a deliberate approach to PR reviews.
    Time An icon of a clock Publish Date
    October 27, 2020
    Person An icon of a human figure Authors
    Steve Jackson
    Sam Jones
    Category An icon of a paper organzier Categories
    Process

  4. Let's hash this out.

    How hashes have changed in the last few versions of Rails, and how you can handle them to minimize the pain of your next upgrade.
    Time An icon of a clock Publish Date
    October 15, 2019
    Person An icon of a human figure Authors
    Steve Jackson
    Category An icon of a paper organzier Categories
    Ruby
    Upgrades

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