Currently I manage a team of four senior backend developers and one principal engineer. Our team is responsible for developing the billing service for a brand new telecom platform. Using Ruby, Kafka, Docker and the HashiCorp infrastructure, we build event driven microservices that make up the billing service, which in turn communicates with other microservices that comprise the platform.As a manager my responsibilities are the happiness of the team, the health of the services and the delivery of new features. My favourite part of the job is the people and I try to ensure the overall satisfaction of the team by listening first in 1-on-1s, protecting their time, encouraging career progression and making sure they get clear requirements. Our platform is on track to onboard a large number of customers in a short period of time, and the health of our services is vital. My responsibilities with this regard include grooming and prioritizing tech debt, completing meaningful RCAs on P1s and defining testing, observability, performance and release requirements. In addition to this, I work closely with the product team and engineering leadership to groom and design new feature requests.

As a team lead I wore many hats. I started by leading scrum rituals and attending more product meetings to groom feature requests, while continuing my primary role as a frontend developer. However, very quickly my primary role became leadership and in the first six months I led a team of 12 frontend, backend and qa engineers in a project to integrate Ting with a new mobile network carrier. Working closely with product and devs, I helped establish a roadmap with milestones, triaged blockers and competing priorities, communicated progress/risk to upper management and coordinated the launch. During these six months I helped reinvigorate our scrum rituals; resulting in groomed and estimated stories, meaningful retros, informative demos and engaging stand ups. Afterwards, I joined a team of backend developers that were responsible for building an account management service in an event-driven ecosystem from scratch for a brand new telecom platform. As a team lead here I managed two developers, worked closely with product and engineering management to groom and plan sprints and learned Ruby so I could contribute to the codebase. The tech stack on this team included Ruby, Kafka, Docker and HashiCorp infrastructure.

I worked on a team of five frontend developers that developed and maintained Ting.com. Ting is Tucow’s mobile telecom and fibre internet brand and its website enables customers to purchase phones, mobile service and fibre internet. I worked on landing pages, shops, order flows, login flows and control panels; all the time working closely with the design team to allow for some really nice customer interactions. Our team utilized DoneJS, a Javascript framework, along with HTML, CSS and testing frameworks for unit and integration testing.

GRNDWRK (Groundwork) was a design agency with a focus in designing and developing custom Wordpress websites for its clients. I completed a 4 month contract with GRNDWRK and got my first taste of the development working environment!

HackerYou - now Juno - is a frontend coding bootcamp. The full-time, intensive, front-end dev program was 2 months long (~10-11 hours/day, 6-7 days/week) and the curriculum was shaped in large-part by Wes Bos.

I moved back to Canada unexpectedly and fell back on a job I was very familiar with. I utilized the due diligence, financial modeling and risk assessments skills I learned during my time at Full Circle Capital. At Equitable I was introduced to the Canadian real estate market, and the job provided me the opportunity to build a life in Toronto.

I left Finance to pursue a career in Psychology. I knew the great impact therapy had on my life and after a long period of consideration, I decided that this would be a fulfilling career choice. After taking 6 months off to backpack India, I enrolled in a 1 year, post-bachelors program at Columbia University; studying abnormal psychology, neuroscience, decision making and research methods.Afterwards, I worked at Daytop New Jersey, a youth residential rehab program, where I assisted teachers, clinicians and family counselors.

During this timeframe, Full Circle invested in the billboard advertising space. We provided small to medium sized billboard operators with financing for construction and acquisitions.This was my first job out of university and I learnt a lot about due diligence, financial modeling and risk assessment. On a personal level, I grew leaps and bounds with regard to discipline and work ethic.