About Me

I'm Steve Valaitis, a father, and software developer in Dallas, TX; who is passionate about writing code, enjoys living an active lifestyle, and spending time with my wife and daughters. I am driven to excel in any task that I take on, and try to always be a better Me today than I was yesterday.

I have been doing full-stack development professionally for about 13 years. I actually started programming when I was 10 years old, and found a copy of Visual Basic my mom had lying around from some computer purchase. Since then I have learned and used a variety of languages in both business and personal settings. I continually strive to expand my knowledge, and stay at the edge of the curve.

In the early part of my career I tended towards Microsoft technologies, but was always left a little frustrated at the lack of community. Around the mid-00s I started to shift towards the open source community, and immediately felt like it was where I belonged. The feeling of sharing, cooperation, and helping other developers be better was what it seemed like software development should be. I thoroughly enjoy contributing to projects that I use when I can to do my part in the community.

To keep myself active and sane I coach youth soccer, play soccer myself, and strength train. I feel that the activities I do in my personal time have tremendous carryover to my professional life.

Coaching gives me the opportunity(just like open source) to give back. I feel very privileged to be able to pass on my knowledge to help these children learn a skill, and responsibility and it is very rewarding to see them put that into practice and be successful.

Playing soccer gives me the opportunity to work with a group to accomplish a task, and to compete and test myself against others.

Strength training is solely about me. To me it's about coordinating my mind and body to achieve one single task. There are few more objective measurements of a person than saying, "Can you move more weight today than you could yesterday?"

Any free time I have that isn't spent learning, coaching, playing, or training is usually spent with my wife and two daughters.