Blog topics include automating processes to reduce human error, increasing speed and cycle time, using modern technologies to reduce complexity and personal hobby projects.

Word of mouth and partnership with colleagues over the years has brought work such as website development, logo/graphic design, email templates, business cards, and photography. View the portfolio at https://jonsimpson.ca/portfolio

As a Senior Development Manager at Shopify, I've been at the forefront of transforming the Customer Experience landscape. My journey has been defined by driving innovation, fostering growth, and evolving technology to support constantly growing and complex product offerings.🌟 Leadership & InnovationLeading teams within the Customer Experience organization, I owned the critical entry point for customers reaching out for support and guidance. With strategic ownership of the Help Center and AI solutions, I enabled customers to effortlessly find solutions to their queries. Through collaboration with cross-functional teams, we led the integration of OpenAI's GPT-4 and Large Language Models into Shopify's Customer Experience platform, resulting in increased AI-driven helpfulness and a significant reduction in inbound contact rates.💡 Team Building & GrowthA pivotal accomplishment during my tenure was building and cultivating an org of 20 developers and 2 managers. I am passionate about growing talent and creating an environment where innovation thrives. Alongside senior managers, we reorganized our org of 50 engineers to best tackle the advent of Large Language Model AI features into our products to provide a more personalized and enjoyable experience for our customers, and increasing the efficiency of our support agents.👾 EngineeringHelped drive future technology and product direction with leaders inside and outside of the org. Eg. adoption of Remix for frontend development, and knowledge sharing its learnings. Hands-on exploration with cross-discipline leaders on the team to quickly ideate and prototype LLM-based chatbots, automated answers for a customer's question, and machine translation of help center content - all opportunities to save significant human time or cost.

I scaled Customer Experience at Shopify as the customer base and product offerings took off!🤝 Leadership and Management- Hired and led in-person and remote teams across North America and Europe consisting of frontend and backend developers. Enjoyed the process of growing developers into high-performers- Grew product, organized work, and identified risks with cross-discipline leadership meetings- Worked in lockstep with our Data team to deliver data-powered products such as search, recommendations, intent detection, semantic analysis- Coached developers inside and outside of the team with achieving their career goals, having a larger influence, working across disciplines, and growing leadership skills- Built relationships across the large Eng org to align roadmaps to unlock future abilities for our product👾 EngineeringBuilt a custom rule engine for Shopify's support inquiries that grew to power the hundreds of business logic rules that route 100,000 interactions a day across chat/phone/email/callback channels. Aggregated data from multiple sources to adhere to strict latency and availability SLOs. Focused on providing a simple UX for the business rules to be changed by the business owners. Ruby on Rails backend with React + Typescript + GraphQL frontend.Rebuilt the Shopify Help Center (help.shopify.com) with Ruby on Rails to replace the previous Jekyll-based site's development constraints. Enabled faster development for internationalized documentation and support, in-house tailored search engine, personalizing of support inquiries, webinars, video library, etc. Worked closely with technical writer team to optimize their workflow with this new system.Volunteered my spare time to co-found the internal mentorship program with Eng/Product/Data/UX discipline leadership. Owned the matching of mentees with mentors on factors like discipline, level, skills, etc. Over four years and several mentorship cycles, powered thousands of mentee-mentor relationships.

As a developer on the small team owning all of the Customer Experience technology, we evolved or rebuilt many of the internal and external tools powering Support at Shopify such as our phone, email, and live chat channels, and Help Center. Helped double the size of the team. Used technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Zendesk, Twilio.

Designed and implemented new features and products for the TravelClick Guest Management Solution, including improvements to infrastructure and operations for keeping developers happy and productive. Projects included:- Implemented DevOps practices by starting biweekly meetings for iteratively improving processes and tools. Has resulted in the addition of automated UI tests, reduced the number of on-call alerts, improved the software deployment process, turned tribal knowledge into documented processes.- Optimization of primary business event processor and workflow engine. Business event processor gained higher throughput and parallelism while constrained to domain-specific requirements. Workflow engine now takes seconds compared to what used to take many hours.- Integrated multiple property management systems with main product, enabling more hotels to come on board. Collaborated with Property Management System vendors to coordinate interface requirements and changes to be made to software. Worked with hotel management and IT personnel to manage installations and offer technical support.- Developed UI automation scripts and XML message generators to automate the creation of high quality data for demo accounts. Gathered rapid feedback from product owners and sales specialist team. Demo accounts have since been used in all live demos to prospective clients.- Migrated ZDirect’s datacentre into TravelClick’s. Planned and successfully executed 250-step playbook for migration day. Performed testing of network latency and throughput from new to old datacentre to determine possibility of an incremental migration. - Improvement of internal tools for tracking uptime and status of remote integrations. Made it quicker to find out when a remote integration is exhibiting unexpected behaviour.- Administration and automation of production linux servers and build infrastructure.

Developed new products to expand the lineup of ZDirect's Automated Hotel Marketing.Projects included:- Built a first in the industry extendable loyalty program for hotels and their guests. Services included a guest portal for guests to check their point balance and redeem their points for items. Front desk interface for looking up guests level and membership information. Backend point calculation service rewarded points based on incoming business events. Frontend services used Java RMI to communicate with the backend. Point calculation service designed to support promotions, points per stay, points per night, points per level. Reporting gave management information about successful marketing campaigns, level upgrades, redemptions, etc.- Modernized the development process by introducing Git, CI, and CD. Reduced the time it took to cut a release from a few days to a few minutes. Increased quality and visibility of the code review process by utilizing GitLab.- Monitored status of many heterogeneous remote integrations and took the steps necessary to bring them back online. Involved collaborating with hotels and IT personnel to troubleshoot problems. - Administration and automation of production linux servers and build infrastructure.

During summer break I helped improve a small business's appearance both online and off through striking visual advertisements and by revamping their main website. Introduced a second channel of business by establishing an ecommerce store for recommending and selling home security equipment and packages.