Originally hired as a developer at Wirkn, I helped completely re-architect their platform to be much more scaleable, robust, and fault-tolerant. Over the years Wirkn has given me the fantastic opportunity to grow the business side of my skill set. Thanks to my work here I've been better able to develop my leadership and management skills as well as gain perspective on the technical aspects of business operations as a whole.

Head of Engineering

I was hired on a contract basis to maintain and enhance McDonald's award winning "Our Food, Your Questions" campaign (Node.js, MongoDB), after my contract was up Tribal/DDB came to see me as a well-rounded developer and offered me a full time web developer position. At Tribal I got to work with even more large well known brands (McDonald's, Subaru, Canadian Tire, Google ... many more) building everything from simple social media plays, to complex Arduino or Electric Imp based "connected objects" hardware projects. I also worked with a variety of languages and platforms, it was a rewarding new challenge every other week.

Full-Stack Senior Developer

Originally hired as a front-end JavaScript developer, I quickly began to fill gaps in areas well beyond just the client side. I was involved in almost every aspect of the IT operations; from back-end (a mix of PHP frameworks, Node.js and Python), to sysadmin (in the Amazon cloud), to QA (building a rudimentary Jenkins CI system) and beyond. I wrote and documented most of the formerly used (as of Nov. 2013) login integration and data migration (users and comments) code and procedures.

Enterprise web development at it's finest. The Globe and Mail's development team is strictly by-the-book agile programming using an enterprise Java backend. I was on a front end team developing with HTML/CSS/JavaScript using JSP and JSLT templates for their proprietary Java CMS (Escenic). I was integral in building the new "Dashboard" web app addon for TGAM subscribers. This app uses real-time communications implemented with CometD (Bayeux server). I also helped maintain their only Python/Django app, a URL shortener for tgam.ca

Front-end Web Developer

At Trapeze, I was on the front-end team working with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In addition to my standard front-end duties, I worked with our backend team extensively honing my Python skills into mastery (mostly using the Django framework). I worked on many major brands including Canadian Tire, Kraft Peanut Butter, Shoppers Drug Mart (and Pharma Prix), Oreo, Maxwell House, Tassimo and many others. Trapeze used to encourage their developers to work on research projects, thanks to that perk I am now well versed with upcoming technologies and methodologies like responsive design, WebGL, NFC and Node.js.

Web Application Developer

Leading a small team of developers we built end-to-end solutions for our clients mostly with a LAMP software stack. ExpressionEngine and Wordpress were our go to frameworks for PHP development. Working at BlueBand Media allowed me to garner a deeper understanding in many aspects of the consumer packaged goods industry. I worked on many projects from simple promotional draws and automated tweets all the way up to nationwide pin collection and entry contests that featured interactive social media content and technical treats like augmented reality. Being the go to guy to get anything technical done was my calling card here. I loved learning new technologies and seeing where I could mesh them with old ones I already knew, this comes in very handy in agency environments.

Director of Technology

Web apps, to comment widgets, to APIs, to in-database JS-engines. I've been writing all kinds of JavaScript for many years.

Before Node.js, PHP was my backend language of choice. I still support quite a few little PHP projects and I think the language has matured well.

I've always been of the mindset that a developer should be able to deploy their code. So when the term "DevOps" got popular, I regularly found myself as "the DevOps guy" on my teams. I live and breath Linux, but I'll get your local dev environments humming in Windows and OSX just as happily. 

Need a backend for 10 users? 10000 users? 10,000,000 users? I can help. Either from scratch or scaling up what you're currently running. If it's an open source backend technology, there's a good chance I've got production experience with it.

Technology Abstractionist and Object Orienter

Andy Kish

Wirkn Inc.

McDonald's Canada - Our Food Your Questions

A Node.js powered URL Shortener web app with Heroku deploy instructions. Now in it's 8th year. My own personal open-source project.

shorten-node

A Node.js library I wrote from scratch for interacting with the gRPC services provided by the Anki Vector robot.

Personal details

Andy K.

Summary

Technical skills

Work Experience

Personal Projects