Leigh Halliday

About me

My name is Leigh Halliday. I’m based in Toronto, Canada, where I live with my wife Marian Serna. I work as a staff engineer at Wrapbook, and I publish React and JavaScript tutorials onYouTube. You can reach me atleighhalliday@gmail.com.

I love backcountry camping, travel, hiking, exercise, guacamole, and brewing kombucha. I speak Spanish, have lived in two South American countries, and earned a coffee-growing certificate from SENA in Colombia. I’ve also taught skateboarding and trained Muay Thai.

Work

Staff Engineer at Wrapbook

– Present

I moved from managing Experience Engineering into a staff engineer role on the same team. Wrapbook builds payroll, accounting, and production tools for film and television.

Senior Engineering Manager at Wrapbook

–

I led the Experience Engineering team in Toronto. Writing from that stretch includessystem tests for ViewComponents and using feature flags to rewrite the Rails view layer.

VP of Engineering at FlipGive

–

Director of Engineering at FlipGive

–

  • Mentored developers, ran one-on-ones, and organized team teaching.
  • Hired, lined engineering work up with the business, and built career paths.
  • Shipped Ruby on Rails and React, with GraphQL, Postgres, and Redis.

Lead Developer at FlipGive

–

Helped the team and platform grow through a Series A, from 4 developers to 9. Led the TeamSnap integration, a dynamic audience and incentive tool, and an upgrade from Rails 4.2 to 5.2 on an eight-year-old application. Put code review standards and internal service conventions in place.

Senior Software Consultant at FlipGive

–

Built Rails, React, GraphQL, Postgres, and Redis systems that helped teams raise more than $20 million. Built a social component that processed and delivered millions of push notifications and feed activities a day. Started a developer peer group at the OneEleven scaleup hub.

Senior Developer at Arcus, formerly Regalii

–

Built APIs and integrations in Ruby on Rails so people could manage bills. The product talked to hundreds of APIs and stored the results in one shape.

Developer at theScore

–

Ingested sports data with Python and served it through a Rails API to the mobile apps.

Instructor at Lighthouse Labs

–

Lead instructor for five cohorts of a part-time introduction to web development. Taught HTML, CSS, Ruby (Sinatra), and Postgres to people who were new to programming.

Senior Developer at FlipGive

–

Lead developer on fundraising and community programs, including Indigo’s Adopt a School (PHP), TD Tree Days (Rails and Postgres), and Aeroplan’s Beyond Miles (PHP).

Web Developer at Carlton Group

–

Built employee incentive software for Bell Canada, Nissan, Subaru, and others. PHP, first on an in-house framework and later Symfony, with MySQL. Sites shipped in English and French.

Programmer at Canadian Cancer Trials Group

–

Modelled clinical trial data and built Oracle Forms and reports so research staff could enter it.

Teaching

I publish React and JavaScripttutorials on YouTube.

Technical writing

I’ve been contracted to write tutorials for a few publications:

Technical experience

  • Ruby and Ruby on Rails in production since 2011
  • React, JavaScript, and TypeScript
  • REST and GraphQL APIs
  • Postgres, MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB
  • Earlier production work in PHP (CakePHP and Symfony), plus Python and Elixir

Diploma, Computer Programmer Analyst, St. Lawrence College, Kingston, 2002–2004.

Contact