Stéphane Boisvert
Verified Expert in Engineering
WordPress Developer
Ottawa, ON, Canada
Toptal 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.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
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.
Work Experience
Principal Developer
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.
Director of Technology
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.
Web Team Lead
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.
Owner
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.
Experience
COVID Alert
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.caCompletely 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.caCreated DRIP email campaigns to increase engagement and convert leads into donors and voters.
WordPress.com Platform Performance Optimizations
http://vip.wordpress.comManaged the testing of large-scale distributed origin data-centers and ran code on over 5,000 servers worldwide.
WordPress VIP Plugins
I worked with clients, identified bugs, prioritized tasks, and reviewed code from colleagues.
National Voter Database Rollout
I led the data normalization and data matching process to integrate disparate datasets into the database.
Certifications
Zend Certified Engineer
Zend
Skills
Libraries/APIs
PayPal API, WordPress API
Tools
MySQL Performance Tuning, Google Analytics, Optimizely
Languages
PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python 3
Paradigms
Web Architecture, DevOps, Distributed Computing
Platforms
WordPress Development, 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
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