Stefan Burke: Senior Software Engineer

2019-24: Bandcamp - Online Music Platform

• Ruby / MySQL / Linux / Cypress / Web

Bandcamp is an online 'fair trade' music store that processed $200+ million in sales in the last year.

I was a senior developer on the Growth team and also built tools for the Support team. My team recently built the slick new mobile web interface, but my favourite technical accomplishments are probably the numerous significant performance improvements I found across many highly-trafficked pages and in gnarly legacy code.

I wrote new tools to measure, test, and verify the pages my team was responsible for. I implemented SEO fixes, measured their effect, and advised other teams about search engines and performance, using my know-how from previous jobs.

On the Support side, I migrated the team to HelpScout and sped up their workflows with automations, shortcuts, and new admin pages.

I also added an easter egg to the purchase dialog which goes viral every now and again.

2009-19: Bouncy Castle Network - Online Booking System

• ASP.Net / C#, MVC, MSSQL / Entity Framework

I was the technical lead and senior developer for an online booking system and website provider for the party hire industry, growing from 1 to 1,200 customers across the UK and internationally and processing 6,700+ bookings per day at the peak of the season.

I was the public face of the software side of the business from its inception, working to support the existing client base through new features while adopting a sales role to bring in new registrations.

Along the way I trained new staff members on support, mentored junior developers, wrote tutorials, hosted marketing seminars, cultivated an online community of hirers, and built an advanced internal CRM to allow the business to double in turnover each year to £1m in 2018.

2012+: Freelancing

• Jekyll, Eleventy, Git, Linux

I build and host my favourite curry cafe's website and manage their social media. Nothing too massive, but I get free curry from it.

I'm 'the web guy' for my friends and family and host a bunch of sites for them, and I manage a local vegan food recommendations website with my wife.

2010-12: Metro Salvage - Vehicle Recycling Firm

• ASP.Net / C#, MSSQL, PHP, Wordpress, Joomla, Magento, IIS / Windows Server, Photoshop

I was the sole developer at one of the North West's largest vehicle recycling yards, creating an intranet and online system to sell leads and parts to other recyclers around the UK through a network of websites and widgets. The system was generating £200k+ of new income after year one.

2007-10: Reach BCS - Web Agency

• Classic ASP, VB, ASP.Net / C#, SQL, Access, PHP, HTML, CSS

I joined as a copywriter but soon adopted an internal security role (read: breaking everyone else's code), finally ending as a full-stack developer. I built custom e-commerce systems, scrapers, image generators, CMS systems, blogs, directories, and internal business automation tools.

2004-7: Lancaster University, Linguistics

I gained infamy within the IT department for routing around the firewall and facilitating mass file-sharing, resulting in meetings with the dean. I've since forgotten everything I learned about Linguistics.

2000+: Recreational Programming

• Linux, Docker, Git, Nix, DNS

I host my own 'private cloud' in NixOS and Debian, which takes a lot of tinkering. Programming is a hobby to me as well as a career - I find it therapeutic to get my headphones on, turn up some good tunes, and get stuck into building something awesome. Having said that, I once had a nightmare about Scala.