Senior Software Engineer
Building scalable web applications

The Journey

Over 9 years, I have worked across companies where I learned to think beyond the code. At Ajackus, I was a key contributor to the French Canadian internationalization that opened VTS (a $1B+ platform) to a new market, and built an Excel importer that turned a manual client onboarding process into a self-service tool. At Zeidler Legal Services, I built risk assessment modules where getting the calculation wrong meant real financial consequences. At EdCast, I watched the support team squint at a massive data table with endless horizontal scrolling, struggling to track which row they were reading. I added alternating row colors. Simple fix, big difference in their daily workflow. I also noticed QA spent hours triggering full user flows just to test email templates, so I built a terminal tool that let them preview any template by number instantly. Currently at Tech9, I build LTI integrations for Canvas LMS, where identifying the right problems to fix first helped reduce the support ticket backlog by 75%.

What Drives Me

I believe developers should own their tools, not rent them. I kept hitting free-tier limits on error monitoring SaaS, watching the pricing jump the moment an app got real traffic. Then it hit me: why does a Rails app need a third party to tell it about its own errors? A gem living inside the app can go deeper: detecting silently rescued exceptions, capturing instance variables, snapshotting GC stats, YJIT metrics, and connection pool health at the moment of failure. So I built Rails Error Dashboard. 12,000+ downloads and 59 releases later, each feature exists because a real user needed it, not because a roadmap said so.

I applied the same thinking to BodhiKit, a coding tutor plugin. Most AI tools hand you the answer, which feels productive but builds no lasting skill. I studied the research (Bloom, Vygotsky, Oakley, Ericsson) and designed a system that makes learners write code while the AI asks the right questions. Spaced repetition keeps concepts from fading, adaptive difficulty keeps challenge in the sweet spot, and the learner actually retains what they practiced. ShipKit came from seeing that most Claude Code starter kits were over-engineered. I studied what actually works (ETH Zurich research on context files, Arize's rule optimization study) and built something minimal: zero-config stack detection for 6 frameworks and a context audit skill that shows you exactly what is eating your context window so you can keep it lean. zs saves 15 minutes of Zed editor configuration per project with a single command. Dotfiles turns a full-day Mac setup into a one-command experience. Small tools, but each one removes real friction from a developer's day.

Beyond the Code

When I am not architecting Rails apps, I am sharing what I learn. My Medium blog (205 followers) covers developer productivity, Zed editor workflows, and building tools that actually help. I also run production infrastructure on Raspberry Pis because sometimes the best way to learn DevOps is to do it on a $80 computer.