In my first year with Golf Canada in 2021, having just gotten comfortable with the organization’s incredible dataset on golf being played in Canada, I pitched the obvious: Why don’t we spin up a large number of servers in the cloud, crunch through the data and gift each member of Golf Canada with their own shareable graphic of the golf they played that year? The go-ahead was quickly given and a furious three week effort resulted in the 2021 #MyGolfYear campaign, a simple but well-received surprise to Golf Canada members.

In 2022 and 2023, with more time for planning and exploration, the #MyGolfYear campaign returned, with the basic summary values such as the Total Rounds, # of Holes, Distance Played and Best Round again being featured, and now adding 15 possible ‘achievements’ a golfer could earn due to their play that year.

For technology, #MyGolfYear is powered by Laravel Horizon running on Amazon AWS Cloud as a fast, parallelized queue to process the millions of scores entered annually by hundreds of thousands of Golf Canada’s membership, with MailChimp and Mandrill used for e-mail and OneSignal for push notifications to provide members with their annual stats package.

With an e-mail open rate in excess of 64% and thousands of shareable graphics making the rounds on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, #MyGolfYear had popular success, but added commercial success via sponsorship with JOURNIE Rewards in 2022 and BDO Canada in 2023 and onwards. To me, like Spotify Wrapped, it is the definition of making use of an organization’s existing assets in a new (heavily ‘inspired by’) way to surprise-and-delight one’s own customers while also creating a saleable new asset.

By the offseason between 2017 and 2018, we’d had enough experience with operating the site and undertook a full rebuild, with the main goal of making the site easy to turn over each year by simply making use of the WordPress Customizer interface, the Events Calendar plug-in and page templates for early in the year, mid-year and the time period in which the event calendar for the festival is partially or fully known. Finally, a standard website operating manual was creating and was provided each year to the new host team along with a screenshare tutorial on major site features.

In 2018, I undertook a rebuild and migration of the CFL Pick ‘Em website to Laravel 5.x in order to improve the site stability, bring the codebase in line with existing internal CFL standards (PHP and MySQL-based whenever possible) and generally improve the website’s featureset. One major goal was to provide updated leaderboard rankings and scores within seconds of each game’s conclusion; Laravel Horizon as a queue/job processing solution makes this possible, with the Amazon Aurora database scaling automatically ramped up as any game enters its 4th quarter.

• Develop a parent WordPress theme containing a home page, article (post) and video template, and generic page template
• Create child WordPress themes that, using SASS variables, swap in team logos and colours in all the appropriate places
• Develop a WordPress plug-in that automatically retrieves data from the CFL API to make the Schedule Page, Standings Page, Stats Page and Player Profile templates available and kept up-to-date
• Implement a website backend that allows for managing data for a CFL Draft, player profiles, custom landing pages and other league-specific features

After the initial MVP was launched in November 2015, a full-time staff of 3 web developers were hired on in the league office in Toronto, Canada and continued to deploy new site features incrementally in weekly development sprints.

• Implement a new, simplified website layout to explain the product’s features and pricing options
• Convert the site to the WordPress content management system, allowing all text displayed on all pages to be editable by GameCentre LIVE staff when copy changes are required
• Improve the usability of the product by introducing a Schedule page with direct links to begin watching games, including a Game Of The Day highlight feature
• Add a Support section that was highly flexible in the content that could be placed within it, with a search feature to allow customers to quickly find answers to their questions

Despite managing one of the largest teams of WordPress developers in North America, I try to not automatically jump to the assumption of WordPress being the best choice to be the basis of a new website. Initially, we considered use of Webhook and other similar static page generators, but our more complex site requirements (single sign-on with NHL.com, data retrieval from the Sportsnet Stats API) nixed that.

Ultimately, we made the decision to go with building a WordPress site where all page content right down to section heads and button text could be modified in the site’s backend. Use of WordPress also allowed us to use top-notch plug-ins such as Polylang, Redirection and Yoast SEO, which all come together  as extremely user-friendly tools to allow non-technical staff to efficiently administrate to the website.

I led the technical architecture of the website, bringing in Eric Parlier on contract as lead developer, Brian Skene as design lead and Godwine Lee doing QA duties for the site. The site was launched successfully and on time, and has quickly became what we were hoping it would be: More than just marketing materials for the product, but actually also the primary method for how users of the product find live games and replays to watch, simplifying that process for a great many people.

Compared to the efforts of our peers in Network, our job in IT was relatively straightforward: Implement a secure authentication portal that could scale instantly to the levels required in the Rogers Centre (seating capacity: 54,000) with integration with Cisco. I worked closely with a typically small and nimble team of lead developer Jonathan Bouganim (Sr. Developer) and David Sedgwick (Manager, Quality Assurance) to drive the solution live well in advance of our project deadline.

I attended the home opener of the Blue Jays on April 13, 2015 as part of the team monitoring the deployment in its first mass-scale usage by the public. The project was a complete success, with over 20,000 visitors connecting and making use of the wi-fi simultaneously. Many attendees of the game expressed their pleasure via social media:

https://twitter.com/fabthebrand/status/587791447753121793

https://twitter.com/trishfoto/status/587744116575961088

To coincide with the annual Beauty of Sport issue, I led the development of the update of the custom photo and video presentation developed specifically for the Beauty of Sport package.

Launching in early 2014, I was architect and managed development for the new Citytv.com site, which had previously required use of a separate website application to allow site visitors to watch television episodes online.

In late 2013, I was architect of and managed development for to launch of the new Grand Slam of Curling website.

I oversaw development of this new web property through to its launch in Q3 of 2013.

I led the development in the Rogers Media division for the Rogers-exclusive launch in October 2013 and the Canada-wide launch in November 2013.

In 2012 and the first quarter of 2013, I served as the lead developer on Sportsnet.ca, with my primary focus being the architecture and development of the redesigned site on the WordPress 3.x platform. The new responsive website launched on March 6, 2013.

As a lead developer at Rogers Media, I created the WordPress theme for the relaunched CanadianBusiness.com website in late 2012.

I served as the technical lead on the redesign of this marquee Rogers Media property to its launch on October 24, 2011.

I served as technical lead on this Rogers Media / NBC Universal collaboration, guiding the development of iVillage Canada to its launch on May 9, 2011.

At SoftCom Inc., I developed the revamped site structure based on a .NET / MS SQL / Windows 2008 platform. On the backend, I developed SoftCom’s proprietary real-time provisioning system, as well as the PayPal Payflow based real-time credit card transaction middleware.