Personal details

Dave S.

Timezone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) (UTC-4)

Summary

I'm a full-stack engineer with more than 15 years of professional experience. I'm a true polyglot developer, having lead/architectural experience with a wide variety of tech stacks, from Python/Django, Ruby on Rails, Node (express.js/koa) on the backend, to Angular.js, React and Ember.js on the frontend.

I spent 7 years in the animation industry as a Web Software Architect, building internal applications to help studios manage their production pipelines. Since leaving that industry, I've been consulting mostly with start-ups to help turn their MVP into a solid foundation and scale their tech to a fully fleshed out product.

For the last four years, I've been CTO of a Toronto, Canada based start-up. I helped them scale their tech stack from a single product offering in select Canadian cities to multiple product offerings available nationally across Canada. I built and managed a fully remote, globally distributed team of engineers through new product development and launch, and I also worked closely with the biz and product teams on designing new products and scoping requirements while prioritizing speed to market.

Technical skills

Top 3 skills

JavaScript・10 yrs AWS (Amazon Web Services)・4 yrs Ruby on Rails・8 yrs

Other skills

SQL・10 yrs React・4 yrs Elasticsearch・1 yr GraphQL・1 yr

Work Experience

Senior Full-stack Engineer and Consultant

N/A | Jul 2013 - Present

I help my customers with a variety of technology and software development needs, using technologies that are appropriate for the specific project's requirements. As a consultant, I have: Worked with customers to identify the bare minimum needs for an MVP and architected a product from the ground up using a variety of requirements-appropriate technologies such as Django, Ruby on Rails, and Ember.js. Helped customers expand their MVPs and scale their products to meet customer demand using services and tools such as Heroku, AWS, Ansible and Docker Mentored in-house teams struggling with steep learning curves, and guided the development of apps built using technologies such as Django and Ember.js. Advised customers on a number of technology decisions that were driven by project requirements

Instructor

Bitmaker Labs | Jun 2015 - Feb 2016

I teach students the fundamentals of web development using in-demand technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Javascript, jQuery, Bootstrap, HTML and CSS.