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Stéphane Boisvert, WordPress Developer in Ottawa, ON, Canada
Stéphane Boisvert

WordPress Developer in Ottawa, ON, Canada

Member since March 11, 2021
Stéphane is a principal developer with nearly two decades of experience in the industry and over a decade of experience running large eCommerce and enterprise WordPress sites. Formerly the director of technology for WordPress.com VIP, Stéphane worked on some of the world’s largest sites, spending his time helping clients with architectural decisions, reviewing code for security, and ensuring performance for over 5 billion page views a month across thousands of sites.
Stéphane is now available for hire
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Portfolio

Experience

Location

Ottawa, ON, Canada

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

PHP, WordPress, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Website Performance, Web App Security, Web Analytics, Optimization, Scaling, MySQL

The most amazing...

...accomplishment was increasing online revenue for the Liberal Party of Canada from $60,000 to $5 million and scaled a site to 100 million page views in 24 hours.

Employment

  • Principal Developer

    2019 - 2020
    Canadian Digital Service
    • Participated in the successful launch of COVID Alert, Canada’s exposure notification application with millions of downloads by leading the healthcare integration portal team for physicians and giving presentations to parliamentarians and media.
    • Created and led the SRE (site reliability engineering) team to establish monitoring, reliability, and support capabilities.
    • Developed a set of principles and guidelines for the engineering community.
    Technologies: JavaScript, PHP, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, Strategy

  • Director of Technology

    2013 - 2019
    Automattic (WordPress.com VIP)
    • Helped thousands of sites run over 5 billion page views monthly including a single site reaching over 100 million page views in the span of 24 hours.
    • Led the engineering team and created best practices for WordPress.com VIP clients and developers.
    • Reviewed over 20,000 code commits from VIP clients over the course of five years, giving feedback as well as instructions on how to improve.
    • Managed team members, gave performance feedback, and nurtured a diverse culture of inclusivity and performance.
    • Was on call and responded to emergencies at all times of day or night on diverse problems.
    • Helped shape the WordPress VIP coding standards and guidelines and created documentation for clients.
    • Wrote multiple plugins for WordPress VIP clients that are built into the platform to help the largest sites scale.
    • Led the incident management response in case of a security breach or any downtime.
    Technologies: WordPress VIP, WordPress, Scaling, Website Performance, Web App Security, Optimization, Incident Response, Incident Management, Technical Hiring, Mentorship & Coaching, Code Review, DevOps, Presentations, Public Speaking, MariaDB, SQL Performance, Distributed Computing, Distributed Systems, Distributed Databases, Memcached, WordPress Plugins, WordPress API, WordPress Optimization

  • Web Team Lead

    2009 - 2013
    Liberal Party
    • Increased online revenue from $60,000 a year to over $5 million a year.
    • Completely transformed payment processing and customer management system.
    • Gathered over 200,000 new leads and prospects through contact acquisition.
    • Reached over a million Facebook users through organic shares.
    • Handled a huge increase in traffic overnight as the election ramped up.
    • Worked and led the web team in the Liberal Party war room during the 2011 election.
    Technologies: eCommerce, WordPress, JavaScript, PayPal, PayPal API, Scaling, Membership Sites, PCI, Analytics, Web Analytics, A/B Testing, Optimizely, Google Analytics, Incident Response, DevOps, User Engagement, Paid Advertising, Digital Advertising, Contact Acquisition, MySQL Performance Tuning, PHP Performance

  • Owner

    2004 - 2009
    Freelance
    • Developed custom web applications in PHP and JavaScript with a MySQL back end.
    • Took client requirements and handled project deadlines.
    • Created database software for contact management for niche clientele that responded to exact business requirements.
    Technologies: PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Databases, HTML, CSS

Experience

  • COVID Alert

    Covid Alert is Canada's COVID-19 exposure notification application. The application leverages the Google-Apple Exposure Notification Framework to allow Canadians to securely and privately receive notifications of potential exposure to COVID 19.

    I lead the team working on the healthcare provider platform, which consisted of a Django Python application running on AWS. The app was designed and built based on research with healthcare professionals that would need to use it.

    I was also tasked with presenting the application, both the end-user mobile application and the healthcare portal, to provincial governments, federal legislators in the house of commons and the senate, as well as do multiple presentations to media and journalists. I also spoke on the radio about the project.

    The app is currently used by nearly 20% of Canadians.

  • Liberal Party of Canada Online Donation Platform
    http://www.liberal.ca

    Led the UI/UX and coding of an online donation platform that processed over $5 million in a single year.

    Completely transformed the way eCommerce is handled to increase efficiencies, optimize processes, and reduce costs.

    Managed donor databases; led email campaigns and display and search advertising.

  • Liberal Party Contact Aquisition
    http://www.liberal.ca

    Gathered over 200,000 new leads via issue engagement websites. Handled the analytics, A/B testing, conversion optimization, online and display ads.

    Created DRIP email campaigns to increase engagement and convert leads into donors and voters.

  • WordPress.com Platform Performance Optimizations
    http://vip.wordpress.com

    Created multiple performance improvements and fixes to WordPress.com's millions of websites. Improved parts of WordPress that were subsequently merged into core WordPress.

    Managed the testing of large-scale distributed origin data-centers and ran code on over 5,000 servers worldwide.

  • WordPress VIP Plugins

    I led the maintenance and development of WordPress VIP plugins including Co-Authors Plus, Multiple Site Maps, Facebook Articles, Syndication, Apple News, ES-WPQuery, and many others.

    I worked with clients, identified bugs, prioritized tasks, and reviewed code from colleagues.

  • National Voter Database Rollout

    I was part of the team that managed the rollout of the Liberal Party of Canada's national voter database. This included information on 24 million Canadians—voting preferences, past voting history, issue engagement, etc.

    I led the data normalization and data matching process to integrate disparate datasets into the database.

Skills

  • Languages

    PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python 3

  • Tools

    MySQL Performance Tuning, Google Analytics, Optimizely

  • Paradigms

    Web Architecture, DevOps, Distributed Computing

  • Platforms

    WordPress, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Mixpanel, KISSmetrics

  • Storage

    MySQL, Databases, MariaDB, SQL Performance, Distributed Databases, Memcached, Database Management

  • Other

    Website Performance, Web App Security, Optimization, Scaling, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Strategy, Incident Response, Incident Management, Technical Hiring, Mentorship & Coaching, Code Review, Presentations, PHP Performance, Leadership, Demos, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Optimization, Web Analytics, Public Speaking, eCommerce, Analytics, A/B Testing, User Engagement, Contact Acquisition, Product Demonstrations, Distributed Systems, Gravity Forms, Lead Generation, Data Management, Data Matching, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), PayPal, Membership Sites, PCI, Paid Advertising, Digital Advertising, Public Relations (PR), Publicity, Drip Email, Distributed Caches

  • Libraries/APIs

    PayPal API, WordPress API

Certifications

  • Zend Certified Engineer
    SEPTEMBER 2005 - PRESENT
    Zend

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