North Carolina · Full-stack software engineer
Ethan Shumate
I’m a full-stack software engineer and I’ve been building for startups since my first year of college — web, mobile, backend, and the infrastructure underneath all three. I like owning problems end to end, and I spend a lot of my free time building and polishing side projects.
Featured work
Projects
Side projects I’ve built and polished in my spare time.
Parses Elden Ring save files entirely in the browser and turns them into completion stats, checklists, and an interactive world map. Nothing ever touches a server — and nothing is ever written back to the save.
- Pure-TypeScript save parser running fully client-side, no WASM or native dependencies
- Custom build-time extractor that unpacks game archives directly: Oodle decompression, PARAM/FMG/MSB parsing
- Continuous save polling — watch stats update live while you play
A mobile SSH client that embeds the actual Alacritty terminal — its VT engine and GPU renderer — inside React Native. No WebView impersonating a terminal; the real thing, on iOS and Android.
- Single Rust core combining russh SSH, durable terminal state, and Alacritty’s GLES renderer (ANGLE→Metal on iOS)
- tmux-style session reattach with full scrollback
- ed25519 key generation and storage in the OS keychain
A real-time AI participant for group conversations: it listens, decides for itself when to chime in, and answers out loud. Runs standalone with a mic or joins a Discord voice channel.
- Conversation brain modeled as merged Effect event streams plus a state machine, with barge-in interruption
- Streaming ASR pipeline with voice-activity detection and speaker diarization
- Live persona editing from a web dashboard while the conversation streams in
Frontier LLMs read full Dwarkesh Podcast transcripts and write follow-up essays, summaries, and the questions they wish had been asked. Part fan site, part informal benchmark for long-context reasoning.
- Automated pipeline: yt-dlp audio capture, chunked Whisper transcription, deduplication
- One unified Effect AI interface across Anthropic, OpenAI, Groq, and Gemini with per-run cost estimation
- Fully prerendered static site discovered via link crawling
Off the public record
The stuff I can’t link
Some of the work I’m proudest of lives in private repos. Ask me about it.
Every machine I own boots from one Nix flake — desktop, laptops, WSL. Declarative, reproducible, version-controlled. Includes custom Effect-TS CLI tooling and a deadnix/statix/flake-check lint pipeline.
Why private: It documents everything installed on my machines.
A homelab managed as type-safe infrastructure-as-code: Kubernetes deployments driven by Alchemy and Effect, with a full observability stack (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, AlertManager) plus Plex, Home Assistant, Frigate NVR, the Servarr suite, and Nextcloud.
Why private: It runs my home network and personal services.
Odds and ends
More on GitHub
Work history
Experience
I’ve only ever worked at startups — small teams, broad ownership, shipping fast.
- Joined as the 3rd full-time hire; now lead the engineering team and own the full technical stack
- Built the React forced-alignment reader that draws bounding boxes over PDFs in real time as each word is spoken — on web and mobile
- Run the Kubernetes infrastructure and GPU model hosting, plus the OCR and document-conversion pipeline
- Shipped 1,000+ SEO-optimized SSR pages with Astro, cutting marketing spend by over 80%
- Own payments (Stripe subscriptions, upgrades, upsells), A/B testing, analytics, and CI/CD across AWS and both app stores
- Building the backend APIs and infrastructure behind the game
- Instrumenting the game with stats and analytics
- Second employee; helped land our first clients and at one point consulted for three SF startups at once
- Delivered Flutter and Python backend work for Listening, and OAuth integrations plus full-stack features for Respell AI
- Led firmware and a React configuration site (Web Gamepad API) for a custom game controller
- Built challenge tracking with fitness-tracker integrations (Garmin, Fitbit) and computer vision that counted exercise reps from video
- Owned user wallets, real-money transactions, and automated challenge payouts
- Helped grow the product to 10,000+ monthly users and $500,000+ in GMV
- Pitched and built one cross-platform Flutter app to replace two native apps, paired with a Bluetooth spirometer
- Helped build the HIPAA-compliant auth and PHI APIs with Django REST and PostgreSQL
- Designed both the mobile apps and backend, adopting more ownership over time
- Maintained and extended an in-house C#/WPF logistics suite
- Shipped web and mobile features with Angular and Ionic
Background
Education
- Park Scholar — full-ride scholarship with a four-year leadership program; one of 40 selected from ~2,400 applicants
- Graduated a year early while working at startups the entire time
- Student Body President; dual-enrolled at Surry Community College and VP of its Tech Club, hosting free monthly PC-repair clinics
- Before any of that: repairing phone screens for cash in middle school and working as a PC repair technician
Say hello
Get in touch
Interesting problem, open-source idea, or just want to talk shop about Effect, terminals, or NixOS — my inbox is open.