Alumni Success Stories
Former CIS Student Publishes iOS Book
April 09, 2015
Steve Derico graduated from GVSU in 2009 with a major in IS and a minor in business. After finishing his junior year, Steve did an internship at eBay in California. Upon graduation a year later he joined eBay as a full-time employee, working in eBay’s Network Operation Control Room, the system monitoring epicenter of the vast eBay web site. During this time, Steve worked with a team of engineers solving problems and developing software that was used internally at eBay.
On nights and weekends Steve spent his time teaching himself iPhone programming, and eventually published his own app on Apple’s App Store. In 2011, he left eBay and started his own mobile app development agency, Bixby Apps. Initially, Steve worked by himself, but eventually started hiring additional employees with a focus on developing mobile apps for startups in the Bay Area. Today Bixby builds apps primarily for Fortune 500 companies including BMW, MGM Resorts, Lenovo, Coca-Cola, and The Nielsen Company.
Though Steve is a fairly recent graduate from our IS program, that has not stopped him from a number of notable accomplishments in the field. In addition to starting a highly successful mobile app development agency, this past December Steve published his first book entitled “Introducing iOS 8” with O’Reilly Media, a publisher very well known to software developers. Steve also leads NSMeetup, San Francisco’s largest iOS developer meetup with over 2300 members. As if all that were not enough, he also runs a mobile development training business called AppSchool.com.
Steve has fond memories of his time at GVSU’s School of Computing and Information Systems where he was provided a broad foundation in computer science. In CIS 460 he recalls Dr. Paul Leidig teaching students about cloud computing long before it was a house-hold term. He feels that courses like this helped him learn how to monitor and learn from a world of rapidly evolving technology. The real-world skills he acquired in his capstone course (CIS 463) were used daily during his time at eBay and continue to be valuable to him now as he runs Bixby Apps.
Steve advises current CS/IS students at GVSU to go the extra mile to gain a competitive advantage. He suggests interning at a company you’d like to really work for someday, and also encourages students to establish a github.com profile, posting examples of your own work as well as contributing to open source projects. For students interested in mobile app development, Steve advises that they create an app that they are proud of and get it published before you start interviewing.
You can follow Steve on twitter @stevederico, or keep up with his blog at stevederico.com. You can contact Steve directly at [email protected], (415) 997-9706.