Mike Desjardins

795 Congress Street, Portland, ME 04101
+1 207.956.0599

Work Experience

Sendwave

Director of Engineering, Product Foundation

Hired a 20 person team to re-architect and enhance company's flagship mobile app on iOS and Android, as well as a large-scale refactor of the monolithic backend into distinct services.

  • Lead organization of 20 engineers divided into three smaller specialized teams, as well as individual contributor direct reports, reporting to the CTO of a 60 person engineering org.
  • Created hiring criteria and oversaw hiring process of engineering teams.
  • Managed sprint process and implemented QA and process improvements to enable team to work at peak efficiency.
  • Participated in semiannual performance review process.
  • Continued to contribute as a full stack developer on smaller scale tasks and bugfixes, and wrote specifications for larger projects.

Senior Full-stack Developer (L5)

Expanded international mobile remittance app to support new countries and new payment methods. Served as interim team leader while searching for a new manager. Added functionality and stability to the iOS and Android apps.

  • Implemented new delivery routes to Senegal mobile apps and Ghanaian banks with Python Flask/SQLAlchemy backend
  • Added support for three-country expansion into Europe and remittance capabilities for Senegal
  • Added ability to log into client-side mobile app using biometric authentication
  • Created A/B tests to determine conversion rates of different onboarding flows

MeetEdgar

Full-stack Developer

Developed new features for the company's flagship product, Edgar, using Ruby-on-Rails 5 and React 15. Maintained state management with Redux reducers and used PostCSS CSS modules for styling.

  • Built onboarding process for new users
  • Added multiple-image and video capabilities to content composer and back-end social media network integration
  • Implemented ability to post content to Instagram
  • Automated testing via Jest and RSpec

Time/Warner Cable

Senior Front-end Developer

As a subcontractor for Sigient, Reworked Backbone-based customer service portal.

  • Re-implemented Overview and Appointments modules in React
  • Introduced Webpack and Babel into build process and converted Grails-based asset management to use ES6 modules
  • Built suite of Jasmine-based unit tests
  • Made numerous accessibility improvements

Openbay

VP of Engineering, Software Engineer

Fourth hire (second developer) at online marketplace startup connecting automobile owners with repair shops. Took prototype proof-of-concept Ruby on Rails 4.1 application to launch using agile, iterative approach.

  • Created Elixir/Phoenix based web service that provided vehicle model information to the main application
  • Built numerous features on the front and back end of main Rails application, as well as API endpoints for our mobile application. Some of these features included payment integration, integration with third-party data sources, realtime geospatial queries using PostGIS, and front-end development of public-facing application pages using Backbone, Sass, and realtime PubSub w/ Faye
  • Was responsible for DevOps scripting and maintaining QA, staging, and production environments using Ansible
  • Participated in funding proposal presentations with VC firms

Burnside Digital

Chief Technology Officer

Responsible for establishing the overall technical direction and vision of the company. Ensured that Burnside Digital's technology strategy was aligned with its business goals.

Senior Developer/Tech Lead

  • CityEats CityEats was an online restaurant reservations system built with Food Network (similar to OpenTable).
    • Led team of 4-10 developers in product launch and post-launch support of the Rails app
    • Used a TDD approach to create many features of the site with corresponding specs. These features included payment processing, search, and widget customization
    • Served as interim Scrummaster / Project Manager
  • Cloudshine Cloudshine was an internal effort to create a product that collected exception and performance data on web applications (similar to Rollbar and Airbrake). Made presentation to Wicked Good Ruby Conf 2013 about this project: http://confreaks.tv/videos/wickedgoodruby2013-rails-sojourn-one-man-s-journey
  • MaaSive MaaSive was a mobile library that allowed developers to easily store a retrieve data in the cloud, compatible with several of the most popular mobile platforms (similar to Parse). Ported existing iOS cloud-storage library to Android from iOS
  • Flavorpill Flavorpill was a site that showcased various events and venues in a metro area (primarily New York City). Worked alongside a team of developers from another agency to implement features and refactor data store from a NoSQL solution to a more traditional approach

Independent Contractor

Sony Music

Collaborated remotely with several other developers to create Ariama, an e-commerce destination for classical music fans. Ariama was a Rails-based application that ran on JRuby in a Tomcat application server on Amazon EC2. My primary role was to develop the checkout, search, and download server features.

Intridea

Short-term contract doing Android application development.
  • Digital Trends Developed an Android mobile reader application for Digital Trends. This was a "rescue project" with tight deadlines and sparse specifications
  • Present.ly Assisted with a re-write of Intridea's native Android twitter-like realtime chat client

TotalMusic

Senior Java Developer

Designed and developed RESTful web services for an online music streaming service. The services included a metadata query service, search service, and advertising proxy service.

BlueTarp Financial

Senior Software Developer

Created a JEE web application for the Credit Department to track and score credit applications, and converted an externally facing web application from Apache Struts to a one that uses Hibernate and the Stripes framework.

Boston Communications Group

Open Services API Architect/Team Lead

  • Architected an integrated postpaid/prepaid billing solution for national wireless MVNO, Amp'd Mobile. Co-developed SOAP integration API. Coordinated design effort and served as subject matter expert for entire development team
  • Developed and improved recurring charge engines, realtime charge engines, and taxation engines using C and C++
  • Designed user interfaces for the Voyager online application using Cognos Axiant/4GL and Sybase T-SQL

Seagate

Design Engineer II

Implemented industry-leading real-time servo control firmware for the Atlas 10K II disk drive. Code was implemented on a 32 bit NEC V850 processor in assembly and C.

Personal Projects

Remotely Awesome Jobs

Created a Rails-based job board aggregator that scans various job boards for remote job openings. The site also allowed emploeyers to sign up and post their own jobs. The app was hosted on Digital Ocean and made a very modest profit from a combination of PPC and affiliate advertisements.

Gopher Servers

Created several small Gopher server implementations in different programming languages to see and experience the "aesthetic" of creating the same project in several different different programming languages.

react-a11y-select

react-a11y-select is a simple React-based dropdown selection component with a focus on ease-of-use and accessibility.

Education

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Bachelor of Electrical and Computer Engieering, Minor in Computer Science. GPA 3.4.

See Also