Work on the low-level framework powering Shopify's platform extensibility through 1st and 3rd party apps. This platform operates at scale across critical Shopify surfaces in storefront, checkout, admin and accounts pages.
2016 — Now
As co-founder involved in many roles (technology, strategy, marketing, sales, product development, partnerships), with a primary focus on building software to spur and sustain growth.
Created a performant, offline capable PWA for customers to engage with our brand, discover our products, place orders, track shipments, create reviews, initiate exchanges and returns, and unlock loyalty savings. This ecommerce headless storefront - built with AWS (EB, RDS, S3, CloudFront, Lambda), NGINX, PostgreSQL, Node, and vanilla javascript - was hyper-focused on performance, where beyond compression, optimization, caching, service workers, and the like, was server-side powered by a custom, disappearing web framework where (unlike dev environments) pages in production are served directly by NGINX, being built and hot-swapped by the background framework.
Created an admin PWA for managing: orders and fulfillments, inventory forecasting, sales reporting, factory shipments, customers, partners, affiliates and payouts, email campaigns, A/B tests, and hosts of automations, integrations, dashboards, and reports.
Created a platform for our dropshipping partners to order, track, and ship to their customers, as well as a platform for their customers to make exchanges and returns (with tracking) in our system.
Created a platform for our affiliates to see sales, aggregate data, and customer reviews, as well as receive real-time alerts and monthly commission payouts.
Created a platform for blogging partners to create blogs for our website.
Open sourced PureORM: a pure ORM for mapping the relational result rows of a database driver query to properly structured (nested) pure instances of specified business classes. Its name reflects both the rejection of a query builder API in favor of writing SQL (it is intentionally just the objection relational object mapping layer), as well as the yielded objects purity as POJO and not stateful ORM objects.
2019 — 2020
Worked collaboratively with leadership, product, marketing, qa, and data science teams to successfully transform the underlying financial business model from a SaaS MRR product for professionals, to a free platform for professionals and customers using transaction fees and small commissions on new incremental bookings the platform garnered. This new business model aligned our financial interests with the growth and success of the professionals on our platform, and the interests of the customers searching for services. This touched every area of the product, which was built with AWS, MySQL, Python (Django); JavaScript (React/TypeScript/Webpack/Jest).
Built best-practice onboarding, dynamic pricing, schedule gap filling, and last minute cancellation filling features to support the priority for newly aligned features.
Utilized techniques (fake doors, manual process at outset, and a/b tests) to ensure our engineering, marketing, product, qa, data science integrated-team was building features that indeed progressed these jointly aligned professionals, customers, and platform - reducing engineering costs and wasted time opportunity building unused features.
Cleveland/Akron, Ohio Area
As employee #5, built out the TPA Stream web application for automating healthcare benefit administration from a single service to a multi-faceted product, driving the company's growth and positioning within the industry. Built with AWS, NGINX, PostgreSQL, Python (3.6.7), Flask, SQLAlchemy, React (16.8), Webpack, Babel, Jest.
Introduced and fully migrated the frontend codebase from Backbone to React using an incremental approach, while providing training and guidance on the react hook-based paradigm.
Worked with customers, partners, and leadership to develop countless new features (many of which were sorted into new product offerings, billed incrementally, and scaled the growth of the company).
Developed an activity-based permission system based on user types and roles to manage permissions within new products with various user types and user-defined roles.
Wrote extensive, comprehensive automated unit and integration tests, out of personal priority as well as company culture - as an early startup we had no QA engineers.
Moved from browserify to Webpack and introduced code splitting for optimized performance.
Greater New York City Area
Built a continuously delivered, internal application for NBC Universal to help sales associates work with agencies by matching dynamic commercial inventory with demographic data.
As the first engineer, worked closely with NBC Universal product and engineering to grow a team creating the RxJS based commercial inventory app using Angular 4, Typescript, Webpack, Jest, Protractor, and automated with CI.
Education
2007 — 2010
John Carroll University
Bachelor of Arts
2007 — 2010
2011 — 2012
Franciscan University of Steubenville
Master of Arts
2011 — 2012