Steve Vinoski has spent most of his software development career, spanning over more than 30 years, working in the areas of middleware and distributed computing systems. He discovered Erlang in 2006 after nearly 20 years of developing middleware systems primarily in C++ and Java, and he's used Erlang as his primary development language ever since. Steve has contributed to a variety of Erlang projects, including the Riak database, developed and maintained by his employer, Basho Technologies, and the Yaws web server. He's also contributed dozens of bug-fix and feature patches to the Erlang/OTP codebase.

Steve is also a long-time author, having written or co-authored over 100 published articles and papers covering middleware, distributed systems, and web development, as well as a couple books. He wrote "The Functional Web" column for IEEE Internet Computing (IC) magazine from 2008 through 2012, and prior to that, from 2002-2008, wrote the "Toward Integration" column for IC as well. He also serves on the magazine's editorial board. From 1995-2005, Steve co-authored the popular "Object Interconnections" column on distributed object computing for the C++ Report and later the C/C++ Users Journal. Over the years Steve has also given hundreds of conference and workshop presentations and tutorials on middleware, distributed systems, web development, and programming languages, and has served as chair or program committee member for many dozens of conferences and workshops.