Contact Info
Location: Calgary, Alberta Canada
About my Career
I’m an Engineering Manager with 3+ years of experience building great things and teams.
In my experience as an individual contributor, I peaked at a senior engineer with 10+ years of experience building great software before deciding to go on a leadership journey.
Work experience
Fullscript — Remote, Canada
Engineering Manager
Technologies: React, React native, Ruby on Rails, Graphql, K8S
10/2021 – present
I lead a team of engineers. I’m currently in charge of 4 core engineers. However in my time the number of developers I lead have been dynamic, depending on the projects I have, maxing out at 8 engineers.
Most Impactful projects
- Autoship: Led a one-year initiative to rebuild, scale, and improve our subscription experience with the objective to double subscriptions revenue. Collaborated with designers, customer success, and product teams, ultimately tripling our subscriptions revenue and significantly enhancing the patient experience.
- Sign-up Rewrite: Tasked with rewriting the critical sign-up and authentication logic from Angular and vanilla JS to React/Rails. Set a goal to improve the first user experience with Fullscript, resulting in a 22% increase in top-of-funnel conversions while eliminating numerous bugs.
- Transition to Expo: Initiated and led the transition of our mobile application from bare React Native to Expo. Addressed build fragility and lengthy local build times, saving developers up to 4 hours daily. Implemented a CI and build system using EAS, integrated Expo’s application services into our development and production processes, and reworked the release process to leverage EAS for builds and OTA updates.
- Yearly Load Testing: Conducted comprehensive load testing before major promotions like Black Friday/Cyber Monday to ensure system scalability. Collaborated with 3 developers to create a test suite with over 80 tests and set up conditions using K8S. Worked with DevOps to establish a scalable testing environment and coordinated with domain teams to optimize requests and queries.
- Culture of Experimentation and Learning: Introduced a culture shift towards experimentation and rapid learning by proposing and implementing Mixpanel to measure the impact of changes. Streamlined the setup of experiments, reducing turnaround time from 1.5 weeks to just a day, fostering a more dynamic and innovative environment.
- Domain Health Framework: Created and advocated for a framework to measure domain health, ensuring a structured approach to maintaining and improving system quality.
Zenhub — Remote, Canada
Tech Lead/Backend Engineer
Technologies: React, Ruby on Rails, Graphql, Go
11/2020 – 10/2021
I led a team of 5+ developers, driving the transformation of product analytics and leading multiple successful product feature releases. Oversaw a critical backend migration from Node.js to Ruby on Rails, mentored junior developers, and conducted early technical research. Ensured effective team dynamics through regular stand-ups, refinement meetings, and other agile ceremonies, fostering a collaborative environment.
Most Impactful projects
- Product Analytics Transformation: Spearheaded the overhaul of our product analytics, leading to enhanced data insights and more informed decision-making. This transformation empowered teams with better visibility into user behaviours and product performance.
- Backend Migration: Directed the migration of our backend from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails. This critical initiative improved system stability and maintainability, allowing for faster development cycles and reducing technical debt.
- Planning Poker Implementation: Introduced Planning Poker to improve estimation accuracy and enhance sprint planning. This collaborative technique helped the team achieve more reliable delivery timelines and increased the accuracy of our project forecasts.
- WebSockets for GraphQL via AnyCable: Implemented WebSockets for our Rails app using AnyCable to support GraphQL subscriptions. Ensured scalable connections and optimized performance, significantly enhancing the responsiveness and efficiency of our project management tool.
- Mentorship and Growth: Mentored junior developers, facilitating their growth into more skilled and confident team members. Focused on skill development and career progression through regular one-on-one sessions and tailored feedback.
- Agile Practices: Strengthened agile practices within the team by organizing regular stand-ups, refinement meetings, and other ceremonies. This fostered a collaborative environment and improved the team's overall productivity and cohesiveness.
Clio — Calgary, AB Canada
Senior Software Developer
Technologies: AngularJS, React, Ruby on Rails
02/2019 – 10/2020
I worked as a Senior Engineer, building out features for our growth product. The tool was focused on lead generation for lawyers. The team came to be after we acquired another company mainly focused on lead generation for lawyers(Lexicata), and I was tasked to be on the unification team, a team comprised of members from both Lexicata and Clio meant to integrate their lead generation features onto our growth platform.
I acted as lead developer on several projects which were key features to Clio’s ecosystem such as: user license management, Clio Scheduler (Calendly for lawyers), Integrating payment collection into Clio Scheduler and unifying multiple products.
Most Impactful projects
- Worked on a pro-bono feature add during COVID-19 to help New York City lawyers find and provide free services to clients who’s unemployment claims had been denied and were in immediate need. We turned around this project in about 2 weeks, it has retained 99% uptime!
- Demystifying Elastic search for junior and less experienced developers by dealing with a long standing issue with search weights and presenting results to the entire dev organization.
- Introduced and levelled up our use of code linters by implementing a file watching system and custom rules within our Docker containers that auto-corrects any changed files and alerts for manual intervention if needed
- Architected and implemented a pattern in-app for notifying customer of third party API failures, without any developer or technical escalation intervention.
- Mentoring other developers on Incident management.
Ivrnet Inc. — Calgary, AB Canada
Technical Lead
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Python/Django
02/2017 – 02/2019
Managed a distributed team of six developers, helping level up multiple individuals in both their technical skills and leadership skills.
Most impactful Projects
- Introducing CD on over 10 ruby on rails applications, that were all previously manually deployed on a release cadence by me.
- Created an SMPP (protocol for handling large volume SMS) application which is now being used by Calgary transit watch for reporting and responding to transit rider reports.
- Helped maintain the Ivrnet payment product line which at its core is a telephony system built on asterisk for collecting payments.
AE Sales Group — Calgary, AB Canada
Full Stack Developer
05/2015 – 06/2016
- Maintained an e-commerce platform built on openCart, implementing some new key plugins for the custom business, such as the company's own freight calculation formula.
- Created and maintained multiple e-commerce web applications built on Ruby on Rails when we deemed openCart a bit too limiting in what it allowed for us to do. This also involved data migrations across applications
- Measured and increased our SEO standing for several key searches and products such that we always appeared in the top two pages.
Forward AG Ventures Inc. — Red Deer, AB Canada
Co-Founder/CTO
03/2015 – 01/2016
Built a web application, for farmers in rural Alberta to buy and sell grain. As of 1 month after general release we had over 50 grain sellers and a couple buyers most being independent businesses.
Kopar LTD. — Camrose, AB Canada
IT Re-education Instructor
05/2013 – 07/2013
Re-educated senior citizens' looking to re-enter the workforce teaching them skills like using Microsoft suite and how to use the internet for research and information gathering
Education
University of Alberta — Camrose, AB Canada
BSc. Computer Science, Minor Philosophy
09/2012 – 04/2016
Volunteering
Black People in Tech Meetup — Calgary, AB Canada
Organiser
03/2019 – 10-2020
- Started a meetup for black people in Tech as a way to connect with other black developers or black people in tech in any capacity.
- The purpose of the group is to be a central hub for all black tech professionals in Calgary AB
- We've grew from 2-23 members and was only just starting when COVID hit.