Steve Kinney

Hi, I’m Steve.

I’m a software engineer and educator based in Denver. Previously, I led Front-End Engineering and Developer Tools at Temporal, where I tackled the fascinating challenge of building interfaces for distributed systems—which is just a fancy way of saying “making complex things simple enough that people actually want to use them.”

My work at Temporal centered on building intuitive UIs that helped developers manage workflows across distributed systems. I joined as the founding front-end engineer and built the foundation for their open source and cloud experiences before scaling up the team that handles all of Temporal’s UI, websites, and developer tooling.

Before that, I served as the very first Front-End Architect™ at Twilio and SendGrid. These roles taught me how to build consensus across global teams and lead through influence rather than authority—a skill that turns out to be surprisingly useful when you’re trying to convince people that your approach to front-end architecture is the right one.

I actually started my career in public education. I was NYC public school teacher in high-need schools across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. I technically had my principal’s license, but I never ended up using it. Today, I’m an instructor at Frontend Masters and founded the Front-End Engineering program at Turing School.

I’ve co-founded DinosaurJS, a JavaScript conference in Denver, spoken at events like JSConf and RailsConf, and authored ”Electron in Action“—though technology moves faster than books, so consider that a historical artifact at this point.