Hello there, I'm Pat Sissons
I'm a Vancouver based Software Engineer, working at Boulevard as an Engineering Manager building a client experience platform for appointment-based, self-care businesses. Previously I was in Engineering at Goldsky on the App development team, and before that a Senior Staff Web Developer for Shopify on the Capital, Installments, and Blockchain teams. I've been building software professionally for over 18 years. I am fluent in building software with modern AI tooling.
In my free time time, you can catch me building open source projects, designing 3D models in Onshape, posting them on Thingiverse and Printables, and then printing them on my Prusa MK3S, riding my Onewheel, going for long walks with my Pomeranian, crafting custom cocktails for my bi-annual menus, tending to my herb garden and tropical plants, and exploring the Canadian west coast.
About me
Professionally, I like working with designers and building design systems and tooling that help developers efficiently create beautiful and intuitive web experiences. I am a heavy user of modern AI tooling with software development, I tend to stay on the edge of new tooling to maintain a good understanding of capabilities and limitations of new tools as they are released. On my own time, I like building small front end applications for various ideas and concepts, most often to learn new tools and libraries. I have a passion for learning and sharing my knowledge with others through talks and mentorship. I am passionate about quality software while balancing timelines and scope to meet the needs of a project. I like to spend my down time with my pomeranian, walking around town meeting up with other dog friends and visiting various dog friendly venues. I am a social extrovert, I love meeting new people whether at a local pub or an external tech event.
- Where is home?:Vancouver, BC
- Smartified at?:University of Alberta
- First software job?:2007 (18 years)
- Office hours?:Boulevard, Remote
- After hours?:Coding, 3D Printing, Cocktails, Onewheeling, Biking, Hiking, Walking, Socializing.
Education
BSc with specialization in Computing Science
Primary degree, focus on algorithms and compiler design, President of the computer science student group.
Diploma in Computer Systems Technology
Technical skills and intro to programming.
Work
Engineering Manager & Staff Engineering Lead
I joined Boulevard to challenge and grow myself into an engineering manager. I lead a team of 6 engineers on the Client Experience team where we build front and back end solutions to serve the clients of Boulevard businesses. My time is split between Elixir/Phoenix, TypeScript/React, and TypeScript/Angular. I am also spending some time to address ancillary areas of Boulevard engineering such as developer experience tooling, observability improvements, and CI/CD optimizations. My role began as an engineering lead but was transitioned to a managerial role midway through, though I still split my time between staff level DX enhancements and managing my team.
Engineering
I joined the startup Goldsky early in 2023 to help grow their blockchain data services product by working closely with our designer to rewrite the marketing site and web app front end from scratch. I have been a core part of our small engineering team, helping out from the AWS k8s layer, to front end engineering in all capacities, all the way up to DevRel at external events.
Senior Staff Web Developer
I worked at Shopify for 5 years on many different teams building various large scale projects. I started out as a web developer and quickly grew into a senior web developer role a few months after joining. I then grew into a staff web developer about 1.5 years after joining, and was promoted to senior staff shortly before departing. I built teams, ran projects, supported other teams, orchestrated relationships with external parties, and operated the after work social program in Vancouver.
More history available on my LinkedIn profile.
Skills
Some recent side projects
Note that many of these side projects are not intended to be fully completed, they are primarily an artifcat of a learning effort.
Some recent accomplishments
Patent published
Methods and systems for multiple gating verifications based on a blockchain wallet. This was a group effort with my blockchain team at Shopify.
Tokengated Commerce: Unlocking Brand Loyalty
A panel I sat on to discuss how Shopify was using blockchain technology to unlock brand loyalty using tokengated commerce.
Get in touch.
Give me a shout if you want to collaborate or have an interesting idea to chat about.
- Github
- patsissons
- Linktree
- patsissons
- Location
- Vancouver BC, Canada