highlighted experience
- Took a career sabbatical to work on personal and open-source
projects plus some part-time freelance work
- Developed masks—a full-featured, open-source, self-hostable auth framework for
Ruby on Rails.
- Contributed to Shopify stores, Wordpress installations, and other
basic applications for various clients.
Full-stack developer
Jan – Jul
- Developed features, performance improvements, and infrastructure
changes in advance of high-traffic product launches
- Prototyped new e-commerce and content management platforms with a
goal of speeding up development and reducing maintenance burden
Shopify 2016–2022
- Formed Shopify's Identity team and led a project to simplify and
secure login, signup, and account management processes.
- Successfully migrated over 2 million accounts to a more secure
single-sign-on system, along with major internal infrastructure.
- Led the development of the initial Identity service, tooling for
integrating with it, and oversaw the complex migration experience,
ensuring no major downtime or security incidents.
Dev ATC manager
2017–2022
- Dev ATC paired Shopify developers with a mentor and had them assist
with incident management, keeping the CI/CD train running smoothly,
and any other developer frustrations related to the largest codebase
throughout the work day.
- I facilitated Dev ATC over 5 years—a program that hundreds of
Shopify developers participated in. I personally mentored a good
number of them.
Developer manager
2018–2019
- Formed another team named "Multi-channel Foundations" with a goal of
improving and maintaining integrations with first- and third-party
marketing/sales channels.
- Managed and coached the foundations team through several major
projects—including a sync service that moved product and order data
between Shopify and major channels. The service cut sync times from
days to near real-time, removing a major source of customer and
on-call frustration.
- Shipped Shopify's GDPR implementation for first and third-party
applications. Onboarded 5 major partners to the API. Managed an
on-call of ~15 developers.
- Took over management of several multi-channel teams, and coached
them through a consolidation of several channel integrations,
ultimately shipping a new product with significantly better reviews.
Staff production engineer
2019–2022
- Joined the CI/CD team, which owned Shopify's build and deploy
infrastructure. I participated in the design and launch of a custom
merge queue, automated deploy monitoring and rollbacks, Github/Slack
integrations, self-hosted github runners, and more.
- Shipped several libraries and UX improvements for simplifying the
deployment and monitoring process—took onboarding to CI/CD from a
multi-step process down to just a few clicks.
- As primary on-call for anything related to Shopify CI/CD, I
participated in many incidents which often required some form of
intervention to roll out or fix problematic changes.
Vantage 2015–2016
Senior Frontend Developer
- Led the design and development of new product features, directly
contributing to the company's first $100k MRR milestone.
- Collaborated with customers to identify needs, designed solutions,
and implemented nearly all frontend code, alongside key backend
APIs.
Freshbooks Lead Developer
2010–2015
- Introduced an auth service for sharing session status across the
frontend, paving the way for single-sign-on and new REST APIs for
expensing, time tracking, and invoicing.
- Led a team that introduced Ember.js, rewrote large portions of the
frontend to use it, and modernized the FreshBooks frontend.
- Ran tech talks and workshops on developing frontend with JS and
Ember.js.
Senior developer
2011–2013
- Tech lead of a QA automation project that introduced Selenium to
FreshBooks. Eventually used by the whole QA team to speed up
easy-to-automate manual testing.
- Brought automated testing to large portions of the codebase by
refactoring o modern Symfony components—introduced a templating
language, HTTP router, request context, and abstractions for
managing permissions.
Intermediate developer
2010–2011
- Developed product features and improvements including VAT support,
updated expense tracking, importing/exporting features, and more.
other work
Freelanced since my early teens, designing and developing websites,
content management systems, backend integrations, and e-commerce
platforms. Have at various points held long-term contracts with local
advertising and design agencies.
Early on I developed an ORM and a few other libraries for a
now-defunct PHP framework named Kohana. Nothing I've made since has
been as popular, but I have contributed to open source efforts at most
companies I've worked at.
education Honours BFA, OCAD University, 2010
languages Ruby, JS/TypeScript, Python, Go, PHP, and more...
frameworks Rails, Django, Angular, React, Svelte, Tailwind, Ember, Sidekiq,
Devise
tech K8s, nginx, GCP, AWS, Cloudflare, git, vim+tmux,
docker/podman+compose, ansible, (Postgre|My)SQL(ite), StatsD,
elasticsearch, redis
experience Full stack, OIDC/OAuth, CI/CD, dev tooling, e-commerce, accounting,
privacy & security, incident response, distributed systems,
self-hosting
o/s contributions masksrb/masks, kohana-jelly, ember-responsive, shipit-engine, krane
volunteering YSM teacher (coding with Scratch), Dog rescue with Mattie's place