I am a results-oriented professional software developer with almost a decade of experience in senior and team-lead positions on a variety of web applications and services. I am seeking a position that will allow me to both leverage my strengths and experience as well as pull out of my comfort zone with new challenges.

Experience

Genesis Community Rehab Toronto, ON, Remote

Software Consultant 2018-2019

• Implemented 3rd party integrations with Quickbooks and provincial health claims portal to automate invoice data entry, saving about a man-week of effort monthly.

VersaPay Toronto, ON, Remote

Senior Software Engineer 2012-2018

• Maintained and developed new features for a funds-transfer web application as the business has pivoted to a B2B Accounts Receivable platform accepting millions in monthly payments from tens of thousands of businesses.
• Maintained and enhanced (solo) a PCI Level 1 certified credit card payments gateway with connections to 7 merchant processors in 3 countries and currencies, as well as ACH/EFT bank payment processing for 10+ banks.
• Participated in annual PCI audits as our engineering contact. Assessed and implemented mitigations for potential security vulnerabilities brought up by a static code analysis vendor.
• Led core infrastructure upgrades, from Rails 2.x on Ruby 1.9 to Rails 3.2 on Ruby 2.3.

Avid Life Media Toronto, ON, Remote

Software Developer 2008-2012

• Designed and led development of a dating platform in Merb that powered 12 individual sites with over 2 million users; later, with a specific focus on the billing section of the platform to support 5 payment gateways and process tens of thousands of monthly purchases.
• Planned and initiated a rearchitecting to a microservices architecture, extracting components as service apps with the goal of reducing effort required for a port to Rails 3.
• Developed a patch for DataMapper and later ActiveRecord to route read queries to a read-only database replica, allowing us to cheaply scale our databases horizontally for more performance.

Quarter Turn Toronto, ON

Software Craftsman 2007-2008

• Co-founded Quarter Turn, a software consulting company.
• Worked on a number of Rails-based web applications using agile methodologies.

Bravenet Web Services Parksville, BC

Software Developer 2003-2007

• Spent two years maintaining a 100kloc PHP application, including addition of new modules.
• Successfully designed, developed and launched two internal pre-1.0 Ruby on Rails applications.
• Led development on a Rails-based adserving system handling over 200m impressions per month; was responsible for both backend and user-facing components; tackled scalability issues resulting in a near-100x throughput increase.

Education

University of Victoria 2003

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

Skills

• Veteran Ruby web developer, strong programming foundations, able to pick up new languages and environments quickly.
• 12 years Rails experience, as well as production deploys of Sinatra, Merb+DataMapper, and static websites generated by Jekyll and Middleman.
• Strong knowledge of OO design.
• Strong technical web design skills, including XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Knowledge of agile development practices, especially test-driven development and working in small frequent iterations.
• Strong knowledge of both Linux and MacOS as a software development environment.
• Experience with server provisioning technologies using Chef and Ansible, as well as limited exposure to the AWS ecosystem.

Selected Code Samples

• Advent of Code solutions, Ruby and others

  Algorithmic data analysis puzzles, now a yearly tradition. Ruby solutions since inception, selected problems in other languages.

• Puzzle Game Solver, Ruby, ImageMagick, Tesseract

  Automated solver for a Sudoku-like game, using an OCR library to determine board state, a constraint-propagation library to generate the solution, and work-in-progress mouse/keyboard automation tools to actively solve the puzzle in the application window.

• Data Aggregation & Mapping, Ruby, Sinatra, SQLite, Heroku, Google Maps API

  A scratch-my-own-itch project to map local real estate listings, filter by size (beds/baths) and price, and flag rejected properties so they wouldn't reappear on future database updates.

• Credit Card Processor Gem, Ruby, Savon

  SOAP wrapper for a a credit card processor using Savon, with a few overrides to work around some quirks of their specific SOAP implementation. Used by a private ActiveMerchant gateway at a previous employer.

• Now Playing, Javascript, React, D3.js

  Movie times aggregator, as an initial project learning React.

Hobbies

I blog infrequently at http://blog.tracefunc.com/.

When not enjoying time with my family, I occupy my time with strategy board games, video games, 3d printing, basic robotics, and curling.

References

Available on request