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Michael Stivala, Full-stack Developer in Barcelona, Spain
Michael Stivala

Full-stack Developer in Barcelona, Spain

Member since June 13, 2018
Mike has over ten years of experience developing robust web-based applications and specializes in building performant Laravel applications using modern test-driven development practices. His experience ranges from working in development teams to deliver complex projects on time to running a digital department. His creativity and communication skills allowed him to work in harmony with clients and other service providers.
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Portfolio

  • Mindbeat
    Laravel, Vue.js, AWS, MySQL, AWS RDS, Product Management...
  • Blonde and Giant
    Craft CMS, Vue.js, Laravel
  • BRND WGN
    Elasticsearch, Linux, Redis, jQuery, JavaScript, Vue.js, PHP, Laravel

Experience

Location

Barcelona, Spain

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Git, Sublime Text, MacOS

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on is WhichBeach.com.mt, one of Malta's most popular websites. I formed a team around my idea and together we launched the site.

Employment

  • Co-founder and Head of Tech

    2018 - 2021
    Mindbeat
    • Developed the MVP of our leadership coaching platform, which gained enough interest from potential clients to justify investment in the company.
    • Built and managed the engineering team to execute the company's business needs in a highly visible, organized, and dependable manner.
    • Managed the product process on Jira, specced features with stakeholders within the company, and ensured that new features on the platform were built to spec.
    • Acted as the tech champion and was part of the leadership team when contributing to the company's overall strategy.
    • Spearheaded the tech onboarding process of new clients, which included relationship-building and answering 3rd party security vendor surveys.
    • Put people and processes in place to handle the tech side of client launches and support requests using a small, bootstrapped, and efficient tech team.
    Technologies: Laravel, Vue.js, AWS, MySQL, AWS RDS, Product Management, Technical Leadership, Remote Team Leadership, Web Architecture, DevOps, Web Security

  • Head of Digital

    2017 - 2018
    Blonde and Giant
    • Created the agency website using CraftCMS as a back-end, utility-based CSS, and VueJS on the front-end.
    • Dealt with all clients requiring software-based solutions and ran the whole process from ideation, strategy, pitching, and execution.
    • Contributed to the overall strategy and direction of the company as a part of the leadership team.
    Technologies: Craft CMS, Vue.js, Laravel

  • Senior Web Developer

    2013 - 2017
    BRND WGN
    • Led the development of a reusable CMS that automatically exposes a REST API for content to be consumed by the front end. It also powers most of the websites delivered by the company.
    • Created the integration with a legacy SOAP API for online insurance creation and renewals for one of Malta's leading insurance companies.
    • Handled the DevOps of all websites built by the company. Helped upgrade the development process to include modern tooling (or automated server creation and version-controlled projects.
    • Led the development of ElasticSearch-based solutions to deliver fast and robust search experiences when dealing with large volumes of data.
    Technologies: Elasticsearch, Linux, Redis, jQuery, JavaScript, Vue.js, PHP, Laravel

  • Web Designer & Developer

    2011 - 2013
    Orange Travel Group
    • Maintained and continued the development of the online booking system that the company used.
    • Designed and developed corporate websites for the holding company and its subsidiaries.
    • Developed a custom multisite CMS to support the company website structure.
    Technologies: JavaScript, CSS, HTML, CakePHP, PHP

Experience

  • Which Beach
    https://whichbeach.com.mt

    This is a personal project made with a couple of other partners. The website integrates with weather APIs to automatically score beaches based on some heuristics. It has become one of Malta's most popular websites (especially during the summer months).

    The application is built in Laravel and is backed by a suite of automated tests. The REST API powers both the front-end and the iOS and Android apps, that we built using the Ionic framework.

  • Martini Summer Game

    I developed an SPA using Vue.js and running of a REST API built in Laravel that allowed players to guess the location of a photo by dropping a pin on a map.

    Players were scored based on the proximity of their guess to the correct answer and their high score was tracked on a public leaderboard.

    In the first month, over 7500+ games were played on the platform.

  • What Floats Your Vote
    https://lovinmalta.com/news/over-12-000-emails-sent-to-candidates-through-lovin-maltas-what-floats-your-vote

    In collaboration with LovinMalta, I developed a platform to allow the Maltese voters to connect with local politicians by choosing issues they felt strongly about and sending emails through the platform to their district's politicians.

    Over 12,000 emails were sent through the website in the first week. The website was able to remain responsive throughout this influx of activity through the use of Redis based queue management that offloaded the email sending to background processes.

  • Saz Mifsud
    https://sazmifsud.com

    Created the eCommerce store for the Malta-based fashion brand Saz Mifsud. The multi-currency store is powered by WordPress and WooCommerce.

Skills

  • Languages

    Sass, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript

  • Frameworks

    Laravel, Laravel Spark, PHPUnit, Vanilla JS, CakePHP, Symfony, Ionic

  • Paradigms

    Test-driven Development (TDD), Web Architecture, Agile Software Development, Pair Programming, DevOps

  • Platforms

    Craft CMS, Web, Amazon Web Services (AWS), LEMP, MacOS, Linux, Docker, Algolia

  • Other

    Software Architecture, Laravel Forge, Full-stack, Architecture, Technical Leadership, SOAP, Vue-router, AWS, AWS RDS, Product Management, Remote Team Leadership, Web Security, Computer Science

  • Libraries/APIs

    Vue.js, REST APIs, jQuery, Pusher

  • Tools

    Git, Sublime Text, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Nginx

  • Storage

    MySQL, Databases, Redis, Elasticsearch, MySQLi

Education

  • Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science
    2008 - 2011
    University of Malta - Malta

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