A Brief Bio - Stephen John Lacey
Steve Lacey is a software engineer at Facebook, based in the Seattle office.
Before Facebook, Steve spent four years at Google working on backend systems for Apps (Docs, Spreadsheets, etc…) building common infrastructure and also worked on some, as yet, announced projects.
Before Google, Steve spent some time in the startup game as a co-founder of SwitchGear Software, a software startup that aims to reduce the pain of home computer ownership. The company is currently is “stealth” mode.
Prior to founding SwitchGear, Steve spent eleven years at Microsoft working on technologies from DirectX through to games - most notably Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Back in January 1995 Steve joined some friends at a small 3D graphics startup named RenderMorphics in London, UK. One month later the company was acquired by Microsoft and shortly thereafter joined the fledgling DirectX (then Games SDK) team. Their product, Reality Lab, became the basis for Direct3D and shipped in June 1996 as the key feature for DirectX 2. After that the team worked on DirectX 3, VRML, IE4, DirectX 5 in Windows Multimedia and Chrome and DirectX 6.
In 1997 Steve relocated to Redmond and in 1998 it was time for something different.
Steve led feature teams on Flight Simulator 2000, Combat Flight Simulator 2, Flight Simulator 2004 and FSX, as well as finding time along the way to run the development team at a new studio; work on a bunch of Xbox stuff including Munch’s Oddysee, NFL Fever and Crimson Skies; build a game engine and scripting engine/language completely from scratch and generally get his fingers into a lot of incredibly interesting pies.
In January 2006 Steve left Microsoft to pursue some cool ideas with SwitchGear Software and in October 2006 joined Google at their Kirkland office. The food was too good to be ignored.
The story continues…
Steve holds a Masters of Engineering in Software Engineering from Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, London, UK, has spoken at a bunch of conferences and events, has a blog, podcast and is officially a geek.
