Marty Stepp's Web Site

About me: My name is Marty Stepp. I live in the Bay Area in California with my loving wife and two children. I am a computer science educator and software developer. Welcome to my web site!

Family: I am exceptionally proud of my two children, Eve and Larry. My wife and I welcomed Larry into our family this summer 2019. Our sleep schedule is still an adventure, but he is a sweet little guy and has started looking at us and smiling and doing other cute things. Being a dad is the greatest joy of my life, and I love seeing these wonderful kids grow and learn and make me proud every day.

Stanford: I worked as a computer science lecturer at Stanford University from 2013-2019. At Stanford I primarily taught CS 106A/B/X (introductory programming in Java and C++), CS 193A (mobile app development in Android), CS 194 (senior software projects and engineering), and other topics.

UW: I previously worked as a senior lecturer at the University of Washington. At UW I taught CSE 142/143 (introductory programming in Java), CSE 154 (web programming in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, etc.), software engineering, data structures, and other topics.

Books: I have written and co-authored several textbooks. I am co-author of an introductory Java programming textbook titled Building Java Programs: A Back to Basics Approach, written together with UW CSE principal lecturer Stuart Reges. Stuart and I also co-authored Building Python Programs along with our colleague Allison Obourn from the University of Arizona. I am the lead author of a web programming textbook called Web Programming Step by Step, with Jessica Miller of Microsoft and Victoria Kirst from UW and Google. I am also first author of a C# textbook titled Computing Fundamentals with C# (no longer in print).

Developer: I have worked as a software developer at Microsoft and Facebook. At Facebook I worked on the iOS SDK and Platform team. I worked on features to help iOS app developers connect their apps to Facebook's authentication and social graph functionality. At Microsoft I worked on business intelligence features for Excel that became part of Office 2007. I spent most of my time on a project called the Excel Web Renderer, which was a web component for rendering and editing Excel spreadsheets in the browser.

Software: I enjoy programming and have worked on several large software projects. I currently write and maintain an online tool for learning and practicing coding problems in a browser, called CodeStepByStep. Previously I wrote a similar online practice tool to accompany our Java textbook, called Practice-It, still used at the University of Washington and many other schools. I wrote a large homework submission and grading system called Grade-It that is still used at the University of Washington and other schools. I develop and maintain a large C++ / Java library used in Stanford's introductory programming classes called the Stanford Portable Library or SPL. I created a Java and Kotlin library to assist students with Android application development, called Stanford Android Library. I also enjoy hacking together small projects such as auto-grading programs for my homework assignments, small learning tools for my students, and other gizmos too numerous to list here.

Arizona: I grew up in Tucson, AZ, where I went to school for K-12 and also got my BS and MS degrees in computer science at the University of Arizona. I did research in geometric algorithms and security, taught several courses as a graduate student, and was a teaching assistant for several years.