Summary
Steve Francia is a Technology Executive (CTO, CIO, VPE) in New York City working at 10gen, the MongoDB company.
SPF13.com is my blog on development, leadership, architecture and social media. It is syndicated on All Top and has been featured in prominent industry publications including CIO Magazine.
I’m a frequent conference speaker on topics including e-commerce, vim, mongodb, big data, hadoop, databases and architecture.
I’m love working with VIM, Python, PHP, Git, Symfony2, Doctrine, MongoDB, MySQL, Linux, and related technologies.
My open-source code on Github.
When not being nerdy, I spend time with my family in Connecticut, play soccer and go skateboarding.
Interests
Since you can obviously tell I am interested in computers, how about what I do when I am not in front of a screen. I enjoy playing sports, now I mostly play basketball, soccer and the occasional frisbee. I also played lacrosse competitively, once upon a time. I have been skateboarding for about 17 years. I enjoy reading, especially history and dystopian fiction. I love movies, my favorite are “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Matrix“.
Executive Summary
Steven Francia, Technology Executive
Steve Francia leads the public side of the engineering organization at 10gen including drivers, integration, evangelism, support and consulting. Steve brings to this role his experience as VP of engineering at OpenSky where he build the worlds first ecommerce site powered by MongoDB and one of the first PHP sites backed by MongoDB. Steve has been an engineer, entrepreneur and executive since 1995 when he built one of the first ecommerce sites while working for American Telecom. His previous roles include CIO/COO at Portero, VP of Development at Takkle and Founder & CTO of Supernerd. Steve loves open source. He has contributed to dozens of open source projects including MongoDB, Doctrine, Symfony2 and Zoop and has started a few of his own. Steve holds a BA from Brigham Young University in Philosophy, where among other things, he created and taught a course on dynamic web development.
My Open Source Projects
Zoop Framework
The first OOP web framework for PHP. Optimized for speed and developer efficiency, it has been downloaded tens of thousands of times and is in production use all over the world.
Ultimate Vim Config
The Ultimate Vim Configuration.
Includes a fantastic base config paired with some of the best plugins available for vim all glued together using pathogen for a clean manageable .vim directory kept up to date using git.
PIV
Php Integration for VIM.
The best plugin for working with PHP in VIM. Updates syntax to 5.3. Includes autocompletion and full PHP manual as VIM dictionary for inline lookups.
Symfony2
Symfony2 is the best PHP Framework 5.3+. While Development is led by Sensio, OpenSky contributes a substantial amount of the development, second only to Sensio. As VPE at OpenSky I lead these development efforts.
Doctrine2
The best ORM / ODM for PHP. I support the doctrine project by employing key Doctrine team members.
MongoDB
Chief Evangelist for MongoDB. Before joining 10gen I built the first ecommerce platform powered by MongoDB at OpenSky. Now at 10gen I help others build innovative solutions using MongoDB.
Timeline
1986: NES. Mario. Zelda. I was hooked, I wanted to know everything about computers.
1993: Started ‘hacking’ into local BBSs, this was the internet before there was the internet.
1994: Wrote my first program, Solitaire for the TI-85.
1995: Caught the internet bug, HTML 2.0 and Netscape were ooh so tempting.
1996: Started playing with UNIX, DigitalUX, Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux.
Developed localized search engine in C.
1997: Joined largest LUG; hacked into university servers.
Provo was an exiting place to be tech wise.. Novell, Corel, Caldera, Word Perfect.
1998: Database Administrator for Mercedes Benz
Launched early e-commerce site ebags for large international luggage company.
Served the people of LA for the next 2 years.
2001: Started Supernerd, a web consulting and development company.
Using PHP and MySQL began development on framework for PHP.. later dubbed Zoop.
2002: Married. Supernerd team grew to an even dozen.
Built e-commerce / CMS system for HealthMinded.
2003: Worked with Stamford University to develop a prototype driving UI for Toyota
Developed and taught web development class for BYU.
2004: Developed hybrid application for Real Salt Lake.
First application of it’s kind that powered print, desktop and web versions of media guide.
2005: Supernerd took on Priceline.com as a client. Developed affiliate program.
Appointed CTO of connect U, looking to reinvent itself. Ultimately investors took in a different direction.
Zoop released under open source license. First AJAX framework for PHP.
2006: Led development of Takkle, sports social network.
2007: Appointed VP of Technology at Portero, luxury auctions.
2008: Promoted to Chief Information Officer at Portero, luxury auctions.
2010: Joined The OpenSky Project as VP of Engineering leading the technology, development and architecture.
2011: Joined 10gen, the MongoDB company, as Chief Application Architect responsible for drivers and evangelism in 12+ languages.