Leigh Halliday
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About Me

My name is Leigh Halliday! I'm based out of Toronto, Canada, where I live with my wonderful wife Marian Serna. I work as VP of Engineering at FlipGive. I produce React and JavaScript tutorials on YouTube. You can reach out to me via email at [email protected].

I love back country camping, travelling, guacamole, brewing kombucha, hablando en espańol, exercising, and hiking.

Work Experience

VP of Engineering @ FlipGive

December 2020 - Present

Director of Engineering @ FlipGive

November 2019 - November 2020

  • Mentoring developers, running 1 on 1s, finding training opportunities, leading developer peer group within OneEleven, organizing team lunch and learns
  • Hiring, aligning engineering resources with business plans, develop career paths and align them with compensation
  • Development of Ruby on Rails and React applications, working with GraphQL, Postgres, Redis

Lead Developer @ FlipGive

June 2019 - October 2019

As a lead developer at FlipGive, I have helped our team and platform grow. We have raised Series A funding, grown our team of developers from 4 to 9, and have added increasingly sophisticated and scalable features onto a mature platform.

I have helped implement code review standards, standardized internal service development, and have been the lead developer on a number of large projects such as integrating with TeamSnap (and serving millions of dynamically generated images serverlessly each day), a dynamic Audience and Incentive tool to allow our Merchandising and Marketing teams to run growth experiments, and have completed an upgrade from Rails 4.2 to 5.2 on an 8 year old application.

Senior Software Consultant @ FlipGive

March 2017 - May 2019

During my time at FlipGive as a senior software consultant, I have grown as a software developer and leader. I have helped build reliable and scalable software in Ruby on Rails, React, GraphQL, Postgres, and Redis which has enabled teams to raise $20+ million towards the cost of participating in sports. I have built a social component, which now handles processing and distributing millions of push notifications and feed activities each day.

Located in the OneEleven scaleup hub, I started a Developer Peer Group to help developers at 50+ tech companies share and learn from each other every month.

Senior Developer @ Arcus, formerly Regalii

February 2016 - March 2017

At Regalii (now Arcus), I was able to gain a great understanding of APIs. Our team built a product which would notify you when your bills were due, and to do this we integrated with hundreds of APIs, normalizing and storing the data in a standard way.

Developer @ theScore

August 2015 - February 2016

At theScore I was able to focus on data processing and APIs. I was part of the backend team responsible for ingesting incoming sports data with Python, and serving this data via a REST API built with Ruby on Rails to the mobile apps which consumed it. It was challenging due to both the complexity of the incoming data, and the scale at which the APIs were consumed.

Instructor @ Lighthouse Labs

May 2015 - January 2016

At Lighthouse Labs I was able to improve my teaching and mentoring abilities. I was the lead instructor for the part-time introduction to web development course over the span of 5 cohorts. During this time, I taught (and helped craft) a new curriculum taught to 10-15 students at a time, all who were new to web development. We covered HTML, CSS, Ruby (Sinatra), and databases (Postgres).

Senior Developer @ FlipGive

January 2011 - August 2015

At FlipGive I was the lead developer for a number of web applications which each made a large impact in communities across Canada. Indigo's Adopt a School program (PHP, CakePHP, MySQL), helped put books in libraries at thousands of schools. TD Bank's TD Tree Days program (Ruby on Rails, Postgres) has helped plant trees in thousands of communities over Canada and the US. Aeroplan's Beyond Miles program (PHP, CakePHP, MySQL) has helped people donate over a billion miles to causes they care about.

Web Developer @ Carlton Group

March 2006 - December 2010

At Carlton Group I was able to gain a great understanding of web applications. I worked with a team of developers on custom employee incentive software for Bell Canada, Nissan, Subaru, and other large companies. The software was built in PHP, originally with an in-house framework, but later in Symfony, with MySQL for the database. Each site was available in both English and French.

Programmer @ Canadian Cancer Trials Group

May 2004 - February 2006

At the Cancer Trials Group I gained a great appreciation for data modelling and SQL. I built data collection tools and reports for clinical cancer trials. My job began by modelling the clinical data collected by doctors. Once the database tables (Oracle) were created, I would design forms (Oracle Forms) for the data entry staff to enter and store digitized copies of the offline forms.

Teaching

I create weekly React and JavaScript tutorials on YouTube for 17k subscribers and have created a course called Next Level Next.js which has been taken by over 250 programmers.

Technical Writing

I have had the pleasure of being contracted to write technical articles and tutorials on a number of websites.

Technical Experience

  • 10+ years Ruby (Ruby on Rails)
  • 5+ years with React (Gatsby, Next.js)
  • 1 year Python
  • 1 year Elixir (Phoenix)
  • 10+ years PHP (CakePHP, Symfony, Wordpress)
  • Experienced with both REST and GraphQL APIs
  • Proficient using a number of databases: Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB