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.
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
- SSH key generation and storage in the OS keychain
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 self-hostable realtime voice gateway: a provider-agnostic core lets you compose any LLM, TTS, and STT provider and serve them over the OpenAI Realtime API, so off-the-shelf OpenAI voice clients work unchanged. The same core powers a group-conversation AI that listens, decides when to chime in, and answers out loud, across a web app and a Discord bot.
- Implements the OpenAI Realtime API (WebSocket), so off-the-shelf OpenAI voice clients connect unchanged
- Provider-agnostic model plane: compose any LLM, TTS, and STT as Effect Layers
- Streaming ASR with speaker diarization and barge-in, served to a web app and Discord
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) alongside 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
effect-speech
Provider-agnostic, Effect-native text-to-speech and transcription library with word-level timestamps and forced alignment. Soon to be open source.
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, along with the OCR and document-conversion pipeline
- Rewrote the open-weight TTS model serving in Rust with CUDA streams to squeeze the most inference out of each GPU
- 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 analytics and error tracking
- 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; built OAuth integrations and 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
- Built an in-house C#/WPF inventory management system
- Maintained and extended an existing in-house 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.