Alex Massaad

StockGlow is an app for Shopify stores that lets stores be proactive about their inventory levels by setting up notifications for low-stock items.

The app provides stores with the following features:
• The stores can be notified before they sell out, and they can set up a customized notification that can be sent instantly or on a schedule to allow the stores to keep their customers satisfied and increase their sales volume.
• Provided the option to send notifications to the stores' suppliers to update them with restocking needs.

I designed, built, and managed the infrastructure for this app.

The Shopify Video Transcoder processes hundreds of Shopify merchant videos every minute and compresses them so they are faster for delivery over the web. It was originally built using AWS technology and written in Go. Under my direction, my team migrated this to GCP by slowly migrating features and testing them with our development environments. The ultimate goal was to align it with all our other cloud services, and we also enjoyed a few other benefits: a 30% speed improvement, cost savings, and zero downtime.

The Coding Education Robot, a unique interactive tool, was a special project assigned to my team at Shopify in Toronto with specific guidelines.

Its function as an ice-breaker style activity facilitated improved communication and teamwork among both engineering and non-engineering support teams. Given a Boston Dynamics robot dog and a room, we aimed to create an accessible coding-based challenge that required teams to generate a series of commands in the shortest time possible to complete an obstacle course.

As the project lead, I directed a team of four engineers, designing and deploying a novel software solution that combined Rails, Python, Boston Dynamics' SDKs, and the GCP PubSub API. Within two weeks, we managed to successfully build a working prototype. My contribution led to the successful execution of a fun and educational hands-on coding activity where complex technical concepts were made engaging and accessible. The project effectively bridged communication barriers between different teams and increased coding literacy among non-engineer personnel, proving a success in solving Shopify's business problem of fostering inter-departmental cooperation.