👋  I'm a Toronto-based programmer, designer, and creative person with 15 years of experience building and nurturing production software.

I am available for work, full-time and contract.
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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 Shopify

Developer lead

2016–2018

  • 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 Vantage

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 Freshbooks

Lead Developer

Lead developer

2013–2015

  • 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

Freelance

2000–present

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.

Open source

2008–present

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