Steve Seow

Personal

WHO AM I?

I play many roles but here are my key identities in no particular order...

Husband and father

I am happily married (sorry ladies) and we have 3 awesome kids. Alex is the oldest and lives on his own now. Ethan and Madeleine are both in elementary schools.

Singaporean living in the US

I was born and raised in Singapore but came to the United States in 1997 to resume my education. Now I call Maple Valley, Washington state, home.

Home Repair Generalist

I take a lot of pride and save a lot of money fixing appliances and other things in the house. Fridge, dishwasher, stove tops, laptops, phones, iPads, etc. I once saw a fridge service guy replace a $15 part in my fridge and billed me for $200. My life was changed forever.

Professional

Until I retire, my professional life will continue to take up a good chunk of my consciousness. My LinkedIn profile captures my credentials, employment, education, etc., but here's a summary.

Technical Program Manager

I am currently a Technical Program Manager for a fintech company called Brex. What's a TPM? You know how at a concert there is always that one person with the walkie talkie and clipboard? You know without that person, there is no show. That's me.

Entrepreneur

For a few years now, I have been working with a friend to build something call Rondeyvu. Check it out. It is in alpha. I also founded and built a versatile data platform named Hoarder Data used by an unnamed music festival company whose name rhymes with 'nutella'. More recently, I also created a live scoring platform for combat sports called Scoring Senate and have almost 20 nicest and most dangerous UFC fighters on the platform.

Chief Technical Officer

I was the CTO of a Dubai-based holding company called ZalmeCo, but because they are relatively small, I had to put on many hats: architect, software engineer, product manager, etc. I know it sounds lofty and glitzy, but that was one of lowest and the darkest point of my career. If you are contemplating working for a Middle East company, let's talk first :) Not all that shines is gold.

Senior Cloud Architect

I left Microsoft in 2020 after almost 15 years. I started as a researcher, then a technical evangelist, then software engineer, before turning in my badge as a cloud architect. I started coding when floppy disks were the thing. I started with Visual Basic 5. These days I spend a lot of time getting lost in the cloud and playing with Flutter. My best app generated about 4K daily downloads before the lawyers of a popular unnamed social media platform came knocking on my door to have me unpublished it.

Time perception expert

While I was at Microsoft, I wrote a book called Designing and Engineering Time and rumor has it that the performance engineers at Facebook have my book. I coined the term 'Barnabus Effect' to explain why there is a perceptual temporal difference between the first and second experiences of an event.

HCI expert

I wrote and published a paper on Information Theory and HCI in the Human-Computer Interaction journal that was lauded as a "ground-breaking and thorough meta-analysis that galvanized the community in the way HCI is practiced..." by my mother.

Doctorate & College Student

Prior to joining Microsoft, I earned a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Brown University after a wonderful time in NYC earning my B.A. and M.A. in Forensic Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Flight Attendant

Believe it or not, I was a flight attendent for Singapore Airlines ! Frigging awesome time visiting 40+ countries before my 22nd birthday :)

Projects

I believe life is short and I don't believe in doing one project. I am also a believer in diversifying one's skills sets. Over the years, I have done all kinds of tech and non-tech projects. No matter how silly they are, I am proud of all of them.

Rondeyvu

Rondeyvu is a modern, simple, and beautiful platform that allows you to create, sell, promote, stream, and manage your online event in one place. We make it drop-dead simple for any artist, teacher, expert, instructor, podcaster, coach, comedian, musician, or performer to run free or ticketed events. Think Zoom + EventBrite + Masterclass for everyone!

Scoring Senate

Scoring Senate was by far one of the most fun projects I did. It uses a concert of cloud technologies (like event hubs, streaming analytics, etc.) to enable active and retired UFC fighters to score a fight live.

barn door

I built this decorative barn door for our living room and documented the steps on Medium. A $200 project that looks like $1,000. You're welcome.

maple valley coding camp

This started as a kids coding camp I did for my town but I later tried to convert the content into digital form. Viewership was low and I was decided to discontinue creating more episodes. Here's the playlist on YouTube. I stopped doing these. The ROI of spending 3 hours to make a 10-minute content watched by 14 people is just not there :)

Computer & Technology explained to Nana and Papa

I wrote this in 10 days by collating all the technical and computer advice that I have given family, friends, and people in my community. Now available on Amazon.com!

PCIQ Test

This was my very first website. It is a Macromedia Flash website that tests your general computing knowledge and give you an IQ score. I build it in response to an MSNBC "digital IQ" test which I thought was flawed. If your browser is still capable of reading Flash, here it is.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I am quite active on social media and use them for what they are good for. Please pardon my frequent sarcasm, rants, pontifications, kvetching, and crude humor.

FACEBOOK

Strictly for friends and family. I do quarterly pruning to unfriend people who don't like my posts and kids' pictures enough. I try to keep professional connections out of this, although I do use it to run professional pages, such as Seattle Startup Founders. This is my Facebook profile.

TWITTER

I am quite active on Twitter, plagiarizing and stealing other people's memes, one-liners, etc. Because of my passion in technology, astronomy, and MMA, you'll find that my posts are annoyingly littered with that kind of tweets. Please follow me on Twitter now!

INSTAGRAM

Strictly to post my casual pictures. Because I don't pose in undersized bikinis for selfies and I am not exactly influencer material, I am followed by few unfortunately. This is my sad Instagram profile.

YOUTUBE

This is my digital version of forcing people to watch boring family vacation pictures, school recitals, and pathetic attempts to create viral videos. Hey, don't forget to comment below and click subscribe.

LINKEDIN

Least exciting of them all because I can't swear too much or crack dirty jokes in there. I only connect with other professionals that I have some professional interaction with, not because we are both in tech, have the same title, or use the same shampoo. Here's my LinkedIn profile.

SNAPCHAT

I am not in high school.

TIKTOK

I created a tech-focused account if you are interested :)

Contact

Email is probably the best way to get a hold of me: sseow@hotmail.com

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