Rare photographic evidence that I exist
Hello - I’m Steven Maguire. I’ve been building software since 2004. Today, I focus on building healthy, productive technology teams. I strive to build teams offering stability, continuing education, mentorship, and career tracks.
As of November 2019, I am the CTO at MDHearing. MDHearing is a direct-to-consumer manufacturer of affordable hearing aids based in Chicago, IL. The technology stack includes: web applications written in PHP and JavaScript; mobile applications written in Swift and Kotlin; and embedded software written in C.
For the four years prior, I led technology at two Xenon Ventures portfolio companies. First, Earth Class Mail, a business mail automation service. Second, Scripted.com, a two-sided content marketplace. The technology stacks included Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and C#/.NET. As a member of the small leadership team at both, I helped produce successful turnarounds. I grew the technology teams and stabilized the software platform for both organizations. The properties benefited from dramatic increases in valuation. Earth Class Mail’s valuation increased 300% alone!
I spend some of my remaining time engaging with my community:
- sharing in the Chicago tech meetup community;
- contributing to open source projects;
- authoring online training material;
- discussing product development;
- and volunteering with The All-Stars Project, Development School for Youth. My role at the DSY is a Program Associate.
Working with Steven was one of the best learning experiences of my career. Karl Hughes
I moved to Chicago in 2010 to work on the TrainSignal team. I served four years as the technology team leader, product owner, and an engineer. I contributed a fair amount of C#, JavaScript & PHP code. TrainSignal afforded a chance to flex my UX muscles. We built a game-changing subscription-based online learning platform for IT pros. With the launch of the platform, TrainSignal got acquired by Pluralsight.
Following the TrainSignal acquisition, I spent a couple years helping startups in Chicago. I served in many part-time advisory roles. And I served in one full-time staff role as Head of Engineering for Packback; I left Packback in good hands.
I graduated from ECU in 2008. I earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Digital Media Production.
As a result, filmmaking became a hobby of mine. I produced a short film in my last semester of college. Having relocated to Chicago, I joined teams to produce films for the 48 Hour Film Festival in Chicago, IL. First, in 2012, with Catington Station for a silent film. Second, in 2013, with Whiskey Muzzle for another film. Most recently, in 2019, with Glen’s Raptor Gang for yet another film.
As a full-time college student, I designed and developed a lot of small projects. One of my favorite projects was a blog that focused on people named “Steven”. For that project, I conspired with my good friends, Graham and Rich.
My personal projects use one or many of these frameworks, tools, and technologies:
- Laravel - a popular PHP framework.
- Ruby on Rails - a popular Ruby framework.
- VueJS & AngularJS - popular JavaScript frameworks.
- Bootstrap & Foundation - frameworks to develop front-end code faster and better.
- Codeship - powerful continuous integration and delivery.
- Envoyer - no downtime deployment of PHP applications.
- Forge - easy server setup and management of applications tuned for PHP.
- Trello - a simple tool for organizing any project.
- Digital Ocean - simple cloud hosting, built for developers.
- Twilio - adds SMS and telephony to web applications via API.
- Pusher - provides API support to make web applications respond in real-time.
You may contact me at maguire@hey.com.