Curriculum Vitae

Mike McQuaid

Full Stack Software Engineer

I love solving difficult problems to simplify people’s lives.

I always welcome new opportunities and will travel 1/6 weeks to work anywhere in the world. The other 5/6 weeks I must be able to telecommute from my home in Scotland.

No recruiters who won’t immediately tell me the name of the company.

Personal

Broughty Ferry, Scotland
mike@mikemcquaid.com
mikemcquaid.com/projects/
github.com/mikemcquaid
stackexchange.com/users/3692/mike-mcquaid
linkedin.com/in/mkmcqd
@MikeMcQuaid
+44 (0)773 405 2864

Skills

Extensive experience in Ruby, Rails, Git, JavaScript, SASS, Qt, C++, C, PHP, MySQL, CoffeeScript, Python, CMake, Java and shell scripting. Casual experience with Perl, Objective-C, AWS, Chef, Automake, VB.NET and Android. Productive with other languages in days.

Porting software between Windows, Mac and Linux. Administering Linux servers (virtual and physical), Windows and Mac machines. Passionately advocating, designing and implementing CI systems.

Considerable experience contributing to open-source software and getting patches accepted upstream.

Education

The University of Edinburgh (2003 – 2007)

BSc in Computer Science and Management Science (2:1)

Conference Talks

Experience

AllTrails (2012 – Present)

Full stack engineer developing Rails/MySQL back-end and Coffeescript/SASS front-end for AllTrails and AllSnow. Develop features, APIs and optimise performance. Setup CI and automatic deployment for Rails and mobile applications. Manage and improve AWS infrastructure.

Homebrew (2009 – Present)

Core contributor. Invented Homebrew binary packages (bottles), fix users issues and develop features. Started a successful Kickstarter project which was funded in two hours (out of 30 days) to create a CI system for Homebrew.

KDAB (2009 – 2012)

Technical team lead providing international cross-platform consultancy. Led several teams who always delivered on time and in budget. Generated successful sales leads and sold a six figure contract. Regularly travel internationally to train software engineers, solve hard problems and kick off projects to consistently positive customer feedback. Created a new CI system which replaced the previous one to improve company productivity.

Mendeley (2008 – 2009)

First employee and lead developer for Mendeley Desktop. Setup all servers and software systems. Created a workflow focused on quick deployment and high quality through automated builds, tests, packages for Windows, Mac and Linux. Designed, ran technical interviews and personally recruited three engineers.

Ported Qt/MSVC++ application from Windows to CMake, OSX and Linux. Proposed, implemented the successful rewrite of problematic contracted legacy code creating a faster application and happier users. Designed, implemented the REST XML protocol used between Mendeley Desktop and Web.

BT (2007 – 2008)

Created record-breaking high-performance network analysis applications on the IBM Cell Processor. Taught others about and setup version control, continuous integration and issue trackers. Won a place on the graduate scheme.

Google Summer of Code (2007)

Worked on the KDE project. Improved the KBlog XML-RPC API for KDE 4.0 API freeze. Added rich-text support and posting of journals from KOrganizer which was released in KDE 4.1.

Wolfson Microelectronics (2006)

Wrote battery driver, improved Auxiliary ADC code for Intel XScale on Windows CE. Wrote WM8711 Linux kernel driver which was released in 2.6.26. Improved AC'97, I2S audio drivers and fixed a noisy LCD issue.

Outside Interests

Philosophy, martial arts, skiing, cooking, guitars, photography and politics.

Mike McQuaid