I am a results-oriented professional software developer with over 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 me out of my comfort zone with new challenges.

Experience

Versapay Toronto, ON, Remote

Software Architect 2020-

• Having long-term experience with this application, acted as a subject-matter expert and code owner for our backend payment processing systems, data flows, and APIs, as well as a mentor for junior developers. In this role as SME, served as a primary internal point of contact for our customer success team to answer technical questions and investigate customer issues.
• In support of the overall product as we deal with integrating a merger of multiple companies, implemented a purpose-built secure data storage system for our credit card and bank account data, allowing for our separate products to share data in a PCI-safe fashion, and led development of internal API integrations both as a consumer and provider to act as a data bridge between our client-facing embedded applications and our backend systems.
• Led core infrastructure upgrades, from Rails 3.2 on Ruby 2.3 to Rails 7.1 on Ruby 3.1, and evangelized for the adoption of improved development tooling, such as 3rd-party licence auditing, test coverage monitoring, improvements to our CI system, and static code analysis running on commit.

Attendease Vancouver, BC, Remote

Senior Software Engineer 2019-2020

• Primarily led performance/scalability improvement work, including a user-emulating load test plan using Locust for full-stack benchmarking and profiling, and a series of database and code optimizations to increase our concurrent user capacity per server.

Genesis Community Rehab Toronto, ON, Remote

Software Consultant 2018-2019

• Self-onboarded to a new application in an unfamiliar framework (CakePHP), and implemented 3rd party integrations with Quickbooks and a 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 white-labelled 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.
• Almost 20 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.