Summary

Highly accomplished Staff Developer with 20+ years of experience driving impactful solutions across diverse industries. Proven ability to lead teams, architect complex systems, and improve development practices. Experienced developing the full-stack with strong expertise in front-end technologies. Proven track record delivering scalable, maintainable, and high-performance applications. Adept at mentoring, knowledge sharing, and fostering collaborative environments.

Experience

Shopify :: Staff Developer :: 2021 - 2025

• Led front-end engineering teams on critical internal services: self-serve data exploration, experimentation, and communications platforms.
• Reduced code complexity and improved maintainability by implementing robust coding standards, static analysis, and comprehensive refactoring.
• Accelerated marketing campaign creation by developing a drag-and-drop interface, replacing an error-prone YAML editor.
• Provided technical oversight on personalizing home card feed content in our merchant admin tool.
• Engineered event-driven processing flows for real-time analysis and verification of communication platform notifications.
• Architected marketing campaign visibility tooling, empowering the marketing automation team with actionable insights.
• Wrote and reviewed feature technical designs.
• Integrated LLM agent to evaluate tone and impact of marketing copy.
• Mentored junior developers and interns, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and professional growth.
• Enhanced service reliability and resilience by implementing robust monitoring, observability, and disaster recovery procedures.
• Executed disaster recovery scenarios to improve error handling, alerting, and capturing guidance in our playbooks.
• Defined responsibilities of the "air-traffic controller", a rotating team role that answers user questions, monitors SLOs and error events, resolves security issues, enforces codebase hygiene, etc.
• Resolved complex issues that caused outages, build timeouts, and deployment failures.
• Conducted technical interviews for junior to principal engineering positions.
• Presented topics during knowledge sharing sessions including:
• End-to-end testing with Playwright
• Advanced API mocking techniques
• React application architectural techniques

BDO Lixar :: Staff Developer / Front-End Practice Lead :: 2014 - 2021

• Established front-end development standards that improved code consistency and accelerated onboarding across multiple business units.
• Developed an accelerator boilerplate that reduced project delivery time by providing a standardized development environment.
• Delivered client-facing demonstrations of sprint deliverables, showcasing technical expertise and communication skills.
• Presented topics during developer roundtables including:
  • Writing quality unit and integration tests
  • Sending and receiving Azure IoT Hub messages from a Raspberry Pi
  • Managing complex application state using React context
• Presented how to elastically scale applications during Azure Bootcamps.
• Mentored junior staff and co-op students, fostering a culture of continuous learning.
• Conducted technical interviews.
• Architected and implemented features for a tool used by customs officials to assess risk of packages arriving from overseas.
• Architected and implemented features for an enterprise connected-car platform.
• Improved a major telecom's scheduling tool to let technicians manage their work.
• Delivered a solution to engage university students with an enhanced media delivery platform.
• Developed a solution to allow our client's staff to easily manage invitations to VIPs for marquee events.
• Improved a major telecom's mobile applications by adding new features and introducing modern concepts and practices to the codebase.

JD Irving Ltd :: Technical Lead :: 2010 - 2014

• Provided technical guidance in the delivery of services across multiple domains including application architecture, content management, application lifecycle management, and general development.
• Drove the transition of numerous legacy systems from ASP.Net WebForms to MVC.
• Introduced ALM workflows to development efforts, which improved quality and provided better visibility into the progress of our work.
• Leveraged modern web technologies to build responsive dashboards that optimize themselves for any device: smartphone, tablet, desktop, or display board.
• Developed and maintained a number of marquee websites for Irving brands including Cavendish Farms, the Telegraph-Journal, Midland Transport, and JDIrving.com.
• Mentored team members, presented technical demonstrations, organized lunch and learns, and facilitated weekly team meeting.

Skipjack Financial Services :: Senior Developer (Contract) :: 2009-2010

• Designed and developed an application to manage 24,000 credit card processing accounts in compliance with PCI data security standards.
• Remediated dozens of legacy applications to comply with PCI data security standards.

DEAIS/IMGIS, Department of National Defence :: Senior Developer (Contract) :: 2005-2009

• Designed and developed an application to convert 300,000+ pages from over 20 websites into pages that comply with W3C standards and Common Look and Feel guidelines, reducing time spent by 75% and saving thousands of hours of effort.
• Developed custom CLF v.1 and v.2 templates for websites under the purview of the Information Management Group and CF Ombudsman websites.
• Performed security analysis on dozens of web applications and patched vulnerabilities.
• Gathered requirements, designed, documented and developed a web-based content management system.
• Developed a parsing engine used to migrate 5000+ webpages from the DND Ombudsman website into a CLF 2.0 and W3C-compliant template.
• Audited sites for accessibility, usability and CLF issues.

A Federal Political Party :: Webmaster :: 2001-2004

• Designed, built and maintained the official websites of the party along with its underlying content management system.
• Produced design and technical documentation and user guides for the Team Jersey project - used to provide riding associations with a website and content management tools.
• Managed the party membership database.
• Implemented a strategy to ensure our websites were built with web standards, including valid HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 transitional and strict, CSS, and WAI accessibility.

Sydney Olympics :: Webmaster :: 1999-2000

• Hand-coded webpages for the marquee website.
• Created a page management system to ensure conformance to the site's visual standards and business rules.

Education

Diploma, Applied Information Technology
Information Technology Institute, Halifax, Nova Scotia (2000-2001)

Bachelor of Science (PSYO)
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia (1993-1997)

Competencies

Programming Languages

• Javascript / Typescript
• C#
• Python (working knowledge)
• Ruby (working knowledge)

AI

• LLM Agents
• MCP Servers
• Proxy integrations

Web Technologies

• HTML5
• CSS / SASS / Styled Components
• React
• Responsive Designs
• ASP.Net
• SignalR / Socket.IO / Web Sockets
• Web and Service Workers
• WebRTC
• OAuth
• Ruby on Rails (working knowledge)
• RESTful web services / GraphQL / gRPC

Azure Technologies

• Service Bus
• Event Hub
• IoT Hub
• Azure Functions
• Azure SQL Server

GCP/Cloud Technologies

• BigTable
• BigQuery
• PubSub
• Kafka

Databases

• SQL Server
• CosmosDB
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL

Miscellaneous

• Docker
• Node
• git
• Jest
• Testing Library
• MSW
• Storybook / Chromatic
• Playwright
• Cypress