Derek, who?

Picture of me

I love the challenges that come with building complex systems while promoting reliability, testability, flexibility, and maintainability.

I currently work in the San Francisco Bay Area for Twitch. I thank my amazing wife for giving me the chance to take this opportunity and for allowing me to fulfill my dream of working in the Silicon Valley and for trusting me enough to move 2300km with our 3 month old daughter.

I graduated in April, 2015 with a BSc. with Honors in Computing Science from the University of Alberta. When people ask me what my specialization is I say the internet. I am comfortable across the full stack. I have experience automating and implementing infrastructure managment solutions, desiging APIs from the ground up, and leading full-fledged products, features, and writing the Javascript that powers them.

Outside of work I enjoy spending time in the outdoors and exploring California with my family. I'm extremely passionate about sports including football, cycling, and surfing. I'm not one to shy away from a good pint of craft beer over a board game either.

Open Source Work My Connections

Elevator Pitch Why You Want Me

Before we get to the nitty gritty details, here's why I think I'm the perfect fit for your company:

  • I have a proven ability to quickly learn and adapt to any software stack, framework, or technology.
  • Working for a startup has taught me how to run a software company from both a technical and business perspective.
  • I've lead a large number of projects in both industrial and educational settings.
  • I am extremely proficient in dynamic languages, cloud concepts, utilizing web technologies, and designing consumable services such as REST APIs.
  • I'm driven to make it to the top. I want to be the best at what I do, and am willing to do what it takes to ensure that I always succeed.

Experience Who's Employed Me

Twitch

Full Stack Engineer - Discover & Watch (Clips)
April 2016-Present

I've been working on a variety of user facing features for the Twitch platform and the Clips product with an emphasis on leading projects as a frontend engineer.

  • Designed and delivered the Clips HTML5 embeddable video player
  • Core contributor and project lead on the Clips product
  • Built the VoD analytics product for Twitch broadcasters
  • Mentoring our young engineers to ensure they remain productive

Major Technologies:
Ember.js, Angular, Python, Go, Puppet, Infoblox, Docker, Vagrant, Jenkins, Gulp

Twitch

Full Stack Engineer - Systems
June 2015-Present

Responsible for building a variety of tools for managing, manipulating, and making internal systems tools reliable and more usable at Twitch.

  • Lead developer on an internal capacity planning tool using Graphite and Go.
  • Major contributor for a standardized internal dashboard interface for many internal apps.

Major Technologies:
Ember.js, Angular, Python, Go, Puppet, Infoblox, Docker, Vagrant, Jenkins, Gulp

Mover

Full Stack Developer
2013-Present

End-to-End development of both internal and user-facing tools and features in an agile style environment.

  • Developed Mover's payments and subscriptions systems using Recurly
  • Migrated Mover's Internal API to a RESTful architecture using Symfony Components
  • OOification of many internal systems to allow for increased re-usability and testing
  • Numerous Cloud API integrations including Box, Copy, Dropbox, Google Drive, WebDAV
  • Enterprise tools for complex migrations across many user systems
  • Also specialized in architecting parallelized cloud and robust API interaction technologies

Major Technologies:
PHP/Symfony, Ruby/Rails, Node.js/Express, MongoDB, Angular/React/JavaScript/CSS/HTML5 Nginx/Chef/Vagrant/Berkshelf, PayPal/Stripe/Recurly, Git/GitHub

Gateway Student Journalism Society

Server Administrator/Web Developer
May 2012 - August 2013

Responsible for overseeing and maintaining the Gateway's server resources. Onboarding new staff, maintaining mailing lists, and other administrative duties. Also focused on making the Gateway's website more usable and introduced new features as requested by the multimedia team.

Major Technologies:
Expression Engine/PHP, HTML5/JavaScript/CSS, Ubuntu/MacOS

Invidi Technologies Corporation

Summer Intern Research Developer
May 2011 - August 2012

Developed a number of visualization and simulation tools for the Invidi research group in relation to targeted advertising in television media. These were used for testing hypothesis and visualizing big data.

Major Technologies:
Java, Swing, SAX

Projects Education and Extra-Curricular

TxtCrunch

iOS Developer
January 2015 - Present

TextCrunch is an iOS marketplace app that enables students to buy and sell used textbooks, saving both time and money.

Major Technologies:
Swift, CocoaPods, Parse, Objective C, PayPal

Social Distribution

Full Stack Developer
January 2015 - Present

An experimental school project that demonstrates a potential implementation and use of technologies that could be used to create a distributed social networking stack.

Major Technologies:
Python/Django Rest Framework, React/Reflux, CSS3

Bursa

Full Stack Developer
September 2014 - December 2014

Bursa was an experiment in Bitcoin technology as well as an opportunity to build a system using Golang.
Major Technologies: Go, React, Chef, Berkshelf

Startender

Full Stack Developer
September 2014 - December 2014

Bursa was an experiment in Bitcoin technology as well as an opportunity to build a system using Golang.
Major Technologies: Go, React, Chef, Berkshelf