Six years of professional experience in backend architecture/development, devops, and leadership.

I have also architected, written, and tested React code for a complex SaaS product.

Just don’t get me to style things, please.

What I’m confident in
  • PHP (modern v7+)
  • React
  • GraphQL (backend and frontend with Apollo)
  • API design
  • Documentation
  • Unit & Integration testing
  • Docker
  • Ansible
  • CI/CD
  • AWS
  • Git
  • Relational databases
  • Big picture software architecture
  • Debugging and optimizing
  • Mentoring & leadership






Experience




SmarterQueue (Remote)


CTO, 2018-Present



  
SmarterQueue is a SaaS platform that automates customers’ social media content & publishing





I started here as a contract developer, and a year later was offered the role of CTO to help launch and scale the business.



As CTO, I’m in charge of all things technical - from participating in the day to day standup meetings for our development projects,
to maintaining our entire devops infrastructure and ensuring the reliability of the platform.



I have my fingers in every aspect of the product and constantly have to think about how all the moving parts interact.



Highlights


    
  
  • Architected, developed, and launched the official Android app
    • 
  
  • Interviewed, trained, and led developers to scale the team
    • 
  
  • Solely in charge of all devops, managing 10+ servers, microservices, all identity management, security access, and reliability
    • 
  
  • Incorporated a testing framework for unit, integration, and JavaScript browser tests
    • 
  
  • Architected & led migration from legacy PHP5 / jQuery-UI website to new modern GraphQL + React/Apollo
    • 
  
  • Created scripts that deploy code to production servers, as well as dynamic development servers for testing branches (e.g. xxx.dev.smarterqueue.com)
    • 
  
  • Created a docker-compose config and guide that sets up developers local environment in minutes
    • 
  
  • Optimized complex MySQL queries from 3+ minutes to < 10 seconds on a 20+ million row table
    • 
  
  • Migrated bespoke file logging system to a self hosted Elasticsearch cluster for highly performant and searchable application logging & debugging
    • 
  
  • Setup automated GitLab pipelines that run code quality checks, tests, and deployments
    • 
  
  • Implemented a Redis backend based queuing system for application worker jobs
    • 
  
  • Transitioned from waterfall-style project management to kanban/scrum hybrid with sprints
    • 







Acro Media


Team Lead, 2016-2018



  
Acro Media is an e-commerce Agency that builds & maintains web shops for customers using the Drupal platform





Offered a job as an intern developer, and was promoted to team lead of my department within one year where I managed three developers under me.



This was a business-critical position - the team’s core responsibility was maintaining all the top clients’ SLAs.
When a customer’s site had problems, we were the first to call. This involved constant context switching and required identifying and fixing problems with urgency.



Highlights


    
  
  • Led and mentored a team of 3 developers
    • 
  
  • Created all operating procedures and documentation for the team from scratch
    • 
  
  • Organized and managed devops orchestration (using Ansible) of entire self-hosting side of company (5+ servers, 40+ sites, 20+ developers)
    • 
  
  • Fixed client’s database that had over 3 million rows of corrupt data, then wrote tests and scripts to prevent it from happening again
    • 
  
  • Identified and fixed an outage on a top Canadian telecom ecommerce store during a Black Friday event
    • 
  
  • Completely rebuilt and maintained a checkout flow for a top 3 customer
    • 
  
  • Increased performance on sites by 50% or more by profiling and fixing bottlenecks
    • 
  
  • The first to call when sites/servers went down and needed fixing
    • 
  
  • Contributed to Drupal Commerce core & other commerce related modules
    • 







Lighthouse Labs


Web Dev Student, 2016



  
Lighthouse Labs is a tech education company that offers “bootcamps” to train developers





Completed the web development bootcamp course over the span of a couple months. This helped to launch my career as a professional developer.



Highlights


    
  
  • Learned web development fundamentals, Git, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript
    • 
  
  • Mentored other students on Object-Oriented Programming
    • 
  
  • Collaborated with 3 other students to create our final project for demo-day
    • 
  
  • Created a custom PHP routing & templating framework for our final project (this was done to understand how frameworks & PHP work)
    • 







Neverlift Studios


“Owner”, 2014-2016



  
My own attempt at becoming the next flappy-bird





Developed and released an Android game called “Hipster Dave” that is unfortunately no longer on the app store.



The engine used for the game was written from scratch to learn how Java, Android, and game engines work. Please don’t look at my code.



Highlights


    
  
  • Used YouTube & other online resources on game engine development to create my own game & rendering engine from scratch
    • 
  
  • Worked with external graphic designer & musician to create assets
    • 
  
  • Finished & deployed app to the play store which was downloaded 3000+ times
    •