steven gates · senior software engineer · dallas, tx
Day job: lead engineer at Associa. 50k+ users, $100M+ ARR.
Senior Software Engineer · Dallas, TX. Lead at Associa · associaonline.com · 50k+ users · $100M+ ARR. OpenLoop on Google Play · Image Convert in the browser
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github
53 commits in the last 7 days
1 day contribution streak
3,341 contributions in the last year
primary language: JavaScript
pulled at build · ISR / 1h · source: github graphql v4
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AR face lenses and boomerangs. Live on Google Play.
Free Apache 2.0 Android app: AR face lenses and speed-controlled loops, 100% on-device. No accounts, no ads. Share via Android's share sheet. Live on Google Play.
HEIC to JPG/PNG/WebP in the browser. Nothing uploaded.
Drop in iPhone HEIC photos, get JPG / PNG / WebP back. Decode and encode stay in the browser (WASM + canvas). IndexedDB history and batch ZIP. Live on Cloud Run.
Live Next.js family site. Photos, milestones, search.
Next.js 15 family site at milagates.com: photo timeline, milestones, Supabase auth, RAG search over posts. Built for family, but the stack is public.
contributing / open source
Early adopter and contributor.
Used the orchestration framework heavily when 'agent' wasn't a buzzword yet. Eventually moved to Claude Code directly — fewer headaches, no middleman, native MCP. OpenClaw was the stepping stone; this is the honest version of that story.
Unblocked Windows devs on first-run setup.
PowerShell 5.1 was choking on UTF-8 characters in setup-windows.ps1 because the file shipped without a BOM — a common Windows-10/11 first-run failure. Re-saved the script as UTF-8 with BOM. Encoding-only change, no logic touched, script ran cleanly after.
Hit a silent broken install, wrote a full reproduction, and traced it past the misleading error message to the real cause: postinstall never lands the native better-sqlite3 binary, yet the install still exits 0. Proposed two concrete fixes. Two other developers then confirmed the same regression on macOS ARM and Linux x64 — what looked like one Windows edge case turned out to be a cross-platform install bug.