highlighted experience
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 kohana-jelly, ember-responsive, shipit-engine, krane
volunteering YSM teacher (coding with Scratch), Dog rescue with Mattie's place