Drew McLellan

Staff Software Engineer, Snyk

2023—present

I was promoted within Snyk to the position Staff Software Engineer following the success of our decomposition efforts.

My focus remains on the frontend problem space.

Senior Software Engineer, Snyk

2020—2022

I worked on an internal Frontend Enablement team supporting engineers within the R&D organisation to ship frontend projects. This involved setting standards, providing tooling, and supporting teams through education, recruiting, mentoring, and pairing.

In 2021 I helped facilitate an internal restructuring, creating a new back-of-the-frontend team to work in tandem with the Design Engineering team to provide a unified Frontend Platform within Snyk.

As Team Lead, I was involved in hiring Staff Engineers into the team, and delivering an abmitious project to decompose the Snyk user interface from an existing monolithic application into a dedicated frontend SPA.

Management of the decomposition project within my team saw me collaborating at Manager and Director-level meetings, conducting briefings, and holding weekly Office Hours sessions to ensure effective colloboration with the rest of the department.

Senior Frontend Engineer, Netlify

2020—2020

I worked as a Senior Frontend Engineer at Netlify on the core team for developing and maintaining the React/Redux-based UI at app.netlify.com.

During this time I worked as a lead on developing new features, as well as supporting colleagues in testing, code reviewing, and building out their own.

I was involved in the definition, research, and decision making process for several key architectural decisions for future iterations of the codebase, and participated in collaborative design review meetings throughout each week.

I spent time within the Netlify Community forums helping customers troubleshoot issues. I also participated in a regular on-call rotation, being available to respond 24/7 to service support incidents for one week in every six.

Podcast producer, Smashing Media

2019—present

I work on a freelance basis for Smashing Magazine developing, producing, and hosting the Smashing Podcast. This involves finding and researching guests, recording interviews and news segments, performing audio post-production, and co-ordinating with the Smashing Magazine team to publish an episode every two weeks.

Subject editor, Smashing Magazine

2018—2020

I worked on a freelance basis at Smashing Magazine as an editor for Web Platform articles for the magazine. This involved finding authors, identifying topics, and developing articles for publication.

Director, edgeofmyseat.com

2007—2020

When I joined edgeofmyseat.com we were primarily an outsourced development partner for multiple web design agencies. I developed a PHP/MySQL CMS based on common themes and requirements that were coming up in client projects.

Due to the success of that larger platform, I built Perch, a commercial CMS product designed for those design agency clients to be able to implement themselves for smaller budget projects. We launched Perch on general sale in May 2009, and it has been a large part of our income for 10 years. I handle ongoing development and maintenance of the system, as well as day-to-day customer support.

In addition to CMS projects, I built an e-commerce platform, web asset management system and volunteer management system for a UK-based arts festival client. The system handled millions of pounds of ticket sales and solved all the scale and reliability problems the organisation had around ticket price-increase deadlines with their previous solutions.

In 2018, I developed Notist, a portfolio platform for public speakers. Notist hosts slide decks, resource links, video links and social feedback for presentations.

I have worked in Laravel to develop a REST API to deliver a branched questionnaire learning system for an online training company.

Front-End Engineer, Search Innovation, Yahoo!

2006—2007

At Yahoo! I worked as part of a small incubator project within the Search Innovation department to create new products around local search. After one of our prototypes got commissioned, I took over a team lead for four front-end developers, liaising with design, engineering and product management leads to schedule features and plan sprints.

When I left Yahoo! the product was many months into development but unfortunately never launched.

Senior Web Application Developer, Oliis

2005—2006

At Oliis I worked on FreeAds.co.uk, which at the time was one of the UK’s largest free-listing ad sites. This legacy PHP application operated at surprisingly high scale, and a lot of my work involved making performance and usability improvements. The platform had to be improved very slowly and incrementally, from both a technical and a political viewpoint, with a fragile codebase and internal resistance to change.

Freelance Developer, edgeofmyseat.com

2004—2007

In 2004 I began taking on development projects for edgeofmyseat.com outside office hours. Principally I worked on an international car rental booking system with management of vehicles, selling locations, franchising levels, mark-up and retail rates in multiple currencies and jurisdictions. The system exposed an XML API for franchises to develop their own custom booking interfaces. Classic ASP and SQL Server.

Senior Web Developer, Mirashade

2003—2005

Mirashade was a design and multimedia agency, where I joined a team of web designers, film makers, 3D modellers and UX designers to build out the back end of web projects. Switching to a PHP/MySQL stack, I developed an in-house CMS used for multiple client projects, and an MVC web application framework.

IT Manager, DKNI

2001—2003

DKNI was a full service design and marketing agency, with the IT department being responsible for all web development as well as maintaining computers and networks. I was brought on as a manager, with just one direct report.

My main contribution here was developing a content management system (ASP and SQL Server) to be used as both the basis of regular client websites, and the as foundation of a platform for celebrity fan sites, where membership was purchased with reverse-billed SMS micropayments.

I also developed a SaaS micro-CMS which enabled the editing of static, remote HTML pages through content definitions stored in HTML comments.

Senior Web Developer, Designation

2000—2001

Designation was a design and branding agency. For most of my time there I was the lead technical developer working with a team of multidisciplinary designers on a range of client projects.

One notable project was Cubeez.com, an immersive educational game-based world for preschoolers in support of an animated TV series. With a front end built entirely in Flash 5, I designed an architecture to enable all text content to be translated and delivered from the back end via XML, mostly directly over HTTP from SQL Server’s XML interface. I learned lots about content encoding.

We also built an online marketplace for used jet airplane engines, and I learned about the importance of clear and careful user interface design when a director used an email marketing tool I’d built to sent a test message to the live customer list.

Web Developer, Multiactive Software

1999—2000

At Multiactive (now Maximizer Software) I was responsible for taking over the maintenance and development of the websites and ecommerce store for the EMEA region. I worked in HTML and Perl, and while I was there created the company’s first intranet to much 1990s fanfare.

Freelance Web Developer, (part time)

1996—1999

While in school I built projects for small local businesses and organisations.