
Michael Melanson
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Guelph, ON, Canada
Toptal member since February 22, 2021
Michael is a software developer with several years of professional experience, including building features and developing teams at Shopify and Amazon. Technically, Michael is extremely capable, with robust knowledge of Ruby on Rails and React, along with exemplary communication skills. Michael has also made notable open-source contributions, including Shopify's Liquid templating engine.
Portfolio
Experience
- JavaScript - 6 years
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) - 4 years
- Ruby - 4 years
- React - 4 years
- TypeScript - 3 years
- GraphQL - 2 years
- Shopify - 2 years
- React Native - 1 year
Availability
Preferred Environment
Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Ruby on Rails (RoR), Rust, TypeScript, React
The most amazing...
...project was at Shopify when I worked on an internal hackathon with a team and prototyped a new Liquid template renderer as a bytecode virtual machine.
Work Experience
Staff Software Engineer
Clearco
- Designed and implemented a Stripe-based invoicing system for one of the company's new product initiatives.
- Joined the company's Architect's Chapter as a founding member, helped establish the group's mission of improving the engineering culture at Clearco, and presented the first proposal to the group.
- Designed and re-architected a major redesign of the external account integration system responsible for ensuring the company's adjudication process has a reliable data stream for producing accurate capital offers.
Full-stack Staff Engineer
Copper
- Wrote an API change policy to govern the evolution of the company’s APIs. This policy created a consensus on the team around how to evolve the API, leading to streamlined planning of upcoming features.
- Planned a transition from weekly releases to continuous delivery, which will greatly speed the company’s release cadence. The plan is approved by leadership and is scheduled for Q3 of this year when I will lead the transition.
- Designed an adaptive flow control algorithm based on TCP/IP congestion control to govern the ingestion of data from Sherlock (a newly acquired company) into Copper’s systems, enabling Copper to complete a major milestone in Sherlock’s acquisition.
- Improved greatly the observability of the company’s Webhook delivery jobs for our operations and support teams. This has dramatically improved our support team’s ability to diagnose Webhook delivery issues.
Senior Web Developer
Shopify
- Built and shipped several features, including leading the web development for purchase orders.
- Managed and led the web development work of a project to port the transfers feature to React.
- Mentored and onboarded team members to create the inventory web team as a founding member.
- Managed an intern developer until their early promotion to full-time developer.
- Built the parser/compiler of a prototype virtual machine-based Liquid renderer; this new engine is now in production and showing 4-10 times performance gains. My work "blew [the] mind" of the Shopify CEO.
Software Development Engineer II
Amazon.com
- Implemented incoming message and call notifications to iPhone users of the Alexa application. As a critical component of the core experience, my code executes at least several million times per month with few defects and operational issues.
- Led a project to transition the communications features of the Alexa application to React Native to allow faster iteration on a single codebase for iOS and Android.
- Reduced unnecessary pages on the team's on-call practices by implementing suppression triggers—improving quality of life for on-call engineers by reducing night-time pages.
Principal Software Applications Developer
Entrust
- Served as a lead developer of IntelliTrust: the company's cloud-based authentication and authorization platform; designed the system’s service-oriented architecture and implemented its inter-service communication framework.
- Designed and led the implementation of the project’s React-based front end.
- Implemented a multi-tenant SAML identity provider that was capable of federated authentication with Google Apps, Office 365, Salesforce, and other SAML Service Providers.
Experience
Riscy
https://github.com/michaelmelanson/riscyPinhole
https://github.com/michaelmelanson/pinholeThis project implements a custom TCP-based network protocol, a server-side application development framework, and a desktop client.
Spiking Neural Network Simulation
https://github.com/michaelmelanson/spiking-neural-netI hypothesize that it should simulate a "brain" of similar complexity to a roundworm (C. Elegans) on a typical desktop machine, allowing it to learn to do practical tasks such as operating a simulated robot car.
Unnamed Kernel
https://github.com/michaelmelanson/kernelEducation
Bachelor of Computing Degree in Computer Science
University of Guelph - Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Certifications
Amateur Radio (Advanced Qualifications)
Industry Canada
Skills
Libraries/APIs
React, Node.js, REST APIs, Protobuf, Stripe
Tools
Git, RabbitMQ
Languages
JavaScript, TypeScript, GraphQL, HTML, HTML5, Java, Ruby, Swift, Objective-C, Rust, CSS, SQL, C++, Go
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ember.js, React Native, Swing, gRPC
Paradigms
REST, Object-relational Mapping (ORM), Microservices, RISC-V
Storage
JSON, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Google Cloud Storage
Platforms
Shopify, iOS, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Apache Kafka
Other
Software Development, APIs, Web Development, Full-stack, Architecture, Technical Leadership, Software Architecture, Cognitive Psychology, Neuroscience, Simulations
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