About Me
Hi, I'm Charlie 👋. I live in Woodstock, Ontario. I'm currently a Staff Engineer at Shopify where I'm building the extensibility platform with a focus on creating a world-class developer experience.
Over the years, I've led engineering teams [fun], worked construction [not fun], spent time in the military [sometimes fun], taught guitar, bass, and drums, and dropped out of college twice [fun because it led me to where I am today].
I'm happiest when I'm in a state of constant learning and I learn best by doing.
Experience
- Led a team of 5 Senior+ engineers building the Shopify extensibility platform, providing technical and career mentorship while actively participating in development
- Extensive experience building web applications and APIs with React, TypeScript, CSS, HTML/WebAPIs/DOM, and Node
- Publishing and maintaining public (and private) npm packages such as
@shopify/app-bridge-react, including all the fun CI work that comes with it like GitHub Actions for publishing, changesets, and monorepo management with Turbo 📦 - Communicating with external Shopify app developers and triaging issues via GitHub and Shopify's Partners Slack
- Building an accessible component library using web components and participating in complex API design (coming soon â„¢)
- Styled this site using Tailwind (obviously)
Why do I want this job?
- Working and shipping with a small team
- Playing a bigger role in the open-source community and working directly with the community that I'm building for
- I've already built an accessible Tooltip API following the soon-to-land invokers proposal, what's one more? (/s, tooltips are tricky but I do love the challenge)
- I need an excuse to learn Rust 🦀
- I need an excuse to start posting on Twitter
Projects
Rewrote the Shopify App Bridge library
- Embraced modern web development (see Shopify’s platform is the Web platform)
- Built with web components to be framework-agnostic
- Wrote the docs
- Worked in-depth with iframes, code sandboxing, and DOM manipulation
Built the Mappedin Response MVP
- Built an interactive map-building tool for first responders
- Translated a government contract into a well-defined roadmap and delivered project on time
- Worked in-depth with the HTML Canvas API
Technical Writing
Shopify App Bridge docs
Wrote the majority of the docs following our internal technical writing guidance and using the docs platform constraints (code block styling, layout, etc)
Guide on customizing your macOS terminal prompt
Blog post to help newer developers customize their macOS Terminal prompt with name, colours, and git branch. ~70k reads.
How To Implement A Simple Circular Buffer In C
Blog post to help newer developers implement a simple circular buffer in C. Writing a FIFO buffer was a project in my program at Conestoga College and some peers were struggling with it. ~60k reads.