Rare photographic evidence that I exist
Hello - I'm Steven Maguire. I've been building software since 2004. For the last decade, I'm focused on digital transformations and profitable turnarounds. I do that by delivering on two things. First, by building healthy, productive technology teams. Second, by deploying smart, reliable software solutions. The teams I build offer stability, continuing education, mentorship, and career tracks. The software I deploy is cost-conscious, solves real problems and promotes self-sufficient productivity.
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 1260% alone!
If you have the opportunity to work with Steven you'll never forget it.
Eric Munn Director of Marketing, Chicago Transit Authority
I enjoy spending some of my remaining, albeit limited, 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 non-profit organizations. — I'm quite proud of my five year role at the Development School for Youth with The All Stars Project of Chicago as a Program Associate.
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.
Working with Steven was one of the best learning experiences of my career.
Karl Hughes Former CTO, now Buying and Scaling Digital Service Businesses
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.
- Github Actions - powerful continuous integration and delivery.
- Envoyer - no downtime deployment of PHP applications.
- Forge - easy server setup and management of applications tuned for PHP.
- Basecamp - 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.