Stephen Smith

Hello! Welcome to my portfolio.

Résumé

You're busy, I know this. If you'd like my résumé, I am happy to provide it in PDF format here.

About Steve

My background comes from both business and technology. I started out as a Bachelor of Commerce grad from Saint Mary's University, but my first job out of university was doing market research for a web design company. After that, I freelanced for a year and a half, gaining experience in client service, and figuring out what I liked most about technology.

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.

Current Work

Resmed

Resmed has the world's largest network of connected devices, and ~30 billion PHI records in storage. Suffice it to say, privacy is non-negotiable, and breaches are an existential threat.

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.

Hobby Projects

Every once in a while I'll think "You know, I could write a script to solve that." And then a few hours later I have a piece of code that solves a problem maybe only I have.

YouTube Playlist Manipulator 1

I watch a lot of YouTube, and there are certain things the site won't tell you or let you do, simple things you'd think would be obvious like "How long is this playlist?" So I wrote a script that accepts a playlist ID, iterates through the videos in it, and returns its length in minutes.

YouTube Playlist Manipulator 2

Once I knew what was possible, I was hooked. Next, I built a script that would take my playlist of videos I want to watch and tell me certain statistics about it, like which channel had the most videos in it (Tested, if you're wondering) and if there were any particularly long or short videos that I might want to move to their own playlists (I did this, and it really improved things).

YouTube Search Manipulator

This one definitely counts as "solving a problem only I have". Sometimes I want to search for videos about a person, but that person is a famous YouTuber, so all the results are videos from their channel, which I've already seen.

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.

Vaccine Info 1

This one is definitely not just a me problem. One morning I was watching cycling, wondering when COVID-19 vaccines would open to my age group, and thought "I bet I could automate that."

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.

Vaccine Info 2

Now that I had my first shot, the question became "Where will I get my second?" The existing search didn't filter out fully booked locations, which was a bit of a pain to scroll through (I will reiterate, these are very small problems I'm solving with these scripts).

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.

Past Work

Answer 365

I think call centres get a bad rap. Answer 365 is technically an "answering service", given it was founded back in 1946 and has the antique switchboard in the lobby to prove it. I helped them provide vital services 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, through hurricanes, fires, floods, and a pandemic.

But the work I'm proudest of doing at Answer 365 is the lead role I had with the company's largest client, S.O. Asher. They run hospital home lotteries across the country, with excellent prizes for entrants and great fundraising for the hospitals themselves.

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 hopefully still 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.

Résumé

One more time, with feeling: My résumé is available right here, and I would love to speak with you.

Have a great day!