Eventually, I realized I wanted to get some tech credentials, so I attended the Information Technology program at Nova Scotia Community College. It was a great experience, and I was happy to be named Valedictorian of my graduating class.
When I'm not in front of a computer, I like to cook (pasta, chocolate cake, apple pie) and watch sports (Aussie rules football, cricket, cycling, basketball, baseball, gridiron football, hockey)
Below, I've laid out some of my proudest accomplishments. I hope you enjoy them.
In this role, I help over a thousand developers in countries all over the world comply with corporate security policies, under the slogan "Compliance is mandatory, difficulty is not." I make sure that the secure thing to do is also the easy thing to do. Because why fight human nature, right?
During my first month, I was tested rather severely by the Log4Shell vulnerability, which required me to create a PoC in a couple of hours, then spend the rest of my time having meetings with whoever would listen, trying to persuade them to include just one more patch in their upcoming release.
This was complicated by the aforementioned thousand-plus developers in multiple timezones, but I got it done, and everyone (even the Director of Global Digital Infrastructure, who I suddenly had to become very good friends with) was happy.
So what I did was build a script that performs my search, iterates through the first few hundred results, and excludes everything from a channel ID I provide. Which is how I found this amazing 2010 video of pre-YouTube Tom Scott. Worth every second I spent coding.
As it turns out, I could. The Nova Scotia immunization portal returned all of its data as a JSON file, and when I looked through it I noticed that one of the properties on each vaccination location was minAge.
Knowing this, I programmed a script to check every once in a while what that value was set to, and to send me an SMS via AWS SNS if it was less than my age. A couple days after I built it, my phone went "ding", and I was able to get a 30 minute head start before official word went out.
I looked at the JSON data again, and noticed that every location had a boolean determining whether it was fully booked up or not, and some GIS coordinates denoting where it was. So I modified my existing code to filter out all unavailable spots, calculate the distance to each one, and rank them. It came in just as handy when the time came for shot #2.
Our main software stack was provided by a company called Amtelco, and I learned how to faithfully translate client setup documents prepared for me by our client services team into actual working computer code. The largest script I ever built took 70 hours start to finish (not all in one go, thankfully) and came from a document that stretched to 54 pages long.
When I wasn't building or maintaining Amtelco scripts, I did things like improving the security of the call statistics reporting system, and automating the process of transferring and uploading client call recordings every day.
This means security is paramount, because not only was I responsible for hundreds of thousands of PII records about lottery entrants, but I also had to process millions of dollars in credit card payments without letting anything slip. It's a challenge I relished with each new cycle.
In fact, it went so well that they expanded it! Most recently, I was tasked with building a replacement for our legacy Amtelco inbound/outbound contact centre system, which worked fine for our continuous lines of business but was very expensive to flex up and down when we needed extra capacity during peak lottery order times.
So I built a custom system that embedded AWS Connect's softphone technology in a user interface I built from scratch. Operators would either make or receive calls, and if they needed to place an order, they could link directly into the existing order platform I'd previously built.
The system is running as we speak, processing thousands of contacts and hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour for hospital foundations across the country. It's truly one of the best things I've ever done.
So that meant 16 blogs, 115k posts, and 2.2m pieces of metadata, all dispersed across multiple years, editorial patterns, and people. In the end, I created a custom ETL tool from scratch that extracted data from wherever it may have been, scrubbed it of any anachronisms preventing its smooth transition to the new system, and inserted it into a live site environment.
During the middle of the project we had some time to spare, and I implemented some code optimizations related to image transcoding that made the code run 18 times faster during the second half of migrations. The bottleneck became that their server simply couldn't write the new files fast enough.
In the end, they were so happy, our main Viacom contact in New York called a local vendor in Bedford, and had an enormous lunch for our entire team delivered to the office. That was a good day.
I also helped the QA team get off the ground with process automation, and wrote several glue scripts to do things like synchronize different internal HR systems that had no common interface.
My final bit of client work for them was creating an entire REST API from scratch, for a client who needed an inventory management system. This was a real learning experience for me, as it was the first time I'd really been embedded with front-end developers, learning about modern JavaScript and CSS. And they certainly appreciated the versatile, well-documented, secure API I created for their use.
Have a great day!