Steve Noll, the developer behind devSteve

About

I build thoughtful, performant things for the web, and occasionally turn a storefront into an immersive 3D space you can walk through.

What I do

I came up in the hand-coded era of the web. For years I wrote everything myself, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and SQL, one careful line at a time. It was slow work, and it was the best teacher I could have asked for. You come to understand how the web really fits together when you have built every piece of it by hand, why it breaks, and what good actually feels like.

These days I build differently. I'm an AI-first product engineer, and I lean on modern tools like Claude Code to bring immersive web experiences to life, the kind you can step into and explore. The fundamentals haven't gone anywhere. They're what let me steer, and what let me catch the confident answer that's quietly wrong. But AI amplifies human creativity and ability like no technology before it. It has changed what a single person can imagine and ship, and it keeps the focus where it belongs, on the ideas and the craft instead of the boilerplate.

Highlights

Timeline

  1. Started using Codex, Supabase (PostgreSQL), Drizzle ORM, and Playwright

  2. Started using Claude Code, Next.js, and Redis

  3. Started experimenting with LLM development tools and prompt engineering

  4. Writing mostly full-stack TypeScript at this point

  5. Did a lot of localization / internationalization work

  6. Started using Kubernetes, Kafka, and Microservices

  7. Started using AWS, Docker, and GCP / Firebase

  8. Started using Angular 2.x, ReactJS, Material UI, Node.js, and TypeScript (MEAN / MERN-stack)

  9. Developed a lot of backend REST API's

  10. Started using MongoDB / NoSQL and AngularJS

  11. Started writing unit tests and using CI/CD pipelines

  12. Did a lot of ETL automation work (cron + PHP / Python scripts)

  13. Started using Bootstrap (still mostly PHP / Apache / MySQL on the backend)

  14. Started using Git

  15. Built a lot of sites with Wordpress and Django

  16. Wrote my first Python script

  17. Started writing a lot of jQuery

  18. Worked at my first online start-up (now defunct)

  19. Learned general Linux (LAMP) server administration

  20. Started building full-stack web applications

  21. Wrote my first CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL (LAMP-stack)

  22. Wrote my first HTML