Jason Gedge

I joined Gadget as the first, full-time employee. As a founding engineer, I've been involved in a lot of projects and my fingerprints are everywhere, but some of the bigger things I've worked on:

• Switch our approach to reloading processes for our customers' development environments from xstate to a supervisor that can reload processes in a more controlled manner.
• Helping finalize our switch from PostgreSQL to Elasticsearch for full-text search. Although I didn't build most of the underlying system, I worked out all remaining bugs and made the switch.
• Helping to keep the lights on, especially in the most critical parts of our infrastructure like the database. In particular, I became the resident PostgreSQL and Temporal  expert.
• Took our background actions project from 50 to 100%, with a focus on correctness (introducing idempotency into our retryable bits) and infrastructure (booting up a new temporal cluster).
• Created an automated, zero-downtime migration for moving customers between database storage strategies.
• Migrated our monorepo from yarn to pnpm.
• Swapped out Monaco  for CodeMirror , along with creating our own language server and LSP client to provide autocompletion, diagnostics, and all the things you'd expect out of an advanced editor.
• Load testing scenarios using Grafana's k6 .
• Added a scheduling trigger for Gadget actions (cron jobs, but for Gadget).
• Added real-time streaming to our log viewer.
• Migrated us from one database provider to another with no data loss and within our 30 minute maintenance window.
• A steward of the codebase ensuring dependencies were kept up to date, proper code organization, and good programming practices were used to ensure long-term maintainability.
• User-defined HTTP routes for Gadget apps (e.g., similar to AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions, but slightly less general).
• Created a library  providing typesafe React bindings for Gadget (lots of advanced TypeScript to ensure queried records have the correct shape).
• Initial implementation of @gadgetinc/mobx-quick-tree  (reduced node event loop blocks), along with further improvements.
• Initial implementation of our Shopify connection (managed syncing, webhooks, and oauth for Shopify apps).
• Designed and implemented a planner for nesting Gadget actions. Primarily, you can think of this as a topological sort over the models being acted on to ensure parent records were created before children.
• Rewrite our code runner, switching from a complicated xstate solution to something imperative, with far less code. The end result was something that was far easier to understand and expand upon.

Non-technical things I'm involved with:

• Sharing my knowledge and context of the system to help accelerate all members of our team.
• Work with other senior engineers to help unblock them and provide guidance on various projects.
• Lots of informal mentoring via pairing, code review, and internal conversations.
• Interviewing candidates to assess technical skill (and a small amount of sourcing).

• Helped build and influence the design of packwerk , an open-source tool for enforcing boundaries in Ruby/Rails codebases.
• Building tools, patterns, and educational materials to enforce software architectural boundaries on Ruby/Rails projects.
• Designed and built an intra- and inter-cluster eBPF-based ping mesh for network observability in our Kubernetes platform. Required digging into the TCP stack implementation of linux (bootlin  helped a lot for easy source code navigation)
• Built a data pipeline to isolate performance regressions in the Shopify platform.
• Continued to help build our organization with regular interviews (~1 per week).

• Designed and helped develop Fraud Protect for Shopify Payments (a warranty system for protecting Shopify merchants against fraudulent chargebacks).
• Designed and helped implement a new model for expressing order risk (known as "risk assessments").
• Started interviewing on a regular basis for the R&D organization, primarily pair programming.

• Designed an approach for asynchronous label purchasing.
• Created a regional failover setup for our shipping service (using AWS Route 53).
• Automated our shipping service's infrastructure with Terraform.
• Moved our shipping service from classic EC2 to VPC EC2 with zero downtime.
• Improved performance of our shipping rates/label service through profiling.

• Created new and expanded existing test infrastructure (e.g, static analysis, automated HTML validation, creating and validating test seams for functions with complex responses).
• Move the local development environments to the cloud, with a service that had pre-warmed environments and leasing capabilities.
• Improved the stack by dependency refactoring, reducing build times, build size, and resource consumption.
• Expanded YouTube's primary local development environment with new functionality, also building out new service fakes to improve boot time.

• Focus on computer vision
• Graduated with a 3.8 GPA.
• Awarded an NSERC Graduate Scholarships 
• Thesis: Underwater Stereo Matching and its Calibration 

• Graduated with a 4.0 GPA and first-class honours.
• Dean's list recipient all years.
• Awarded the "University Medal for Academic Excellence" in both Mathematics and Computer Science.
• Led my ICPC programming competition  team to the northeast North American regional twice.
• Thesis: Automatic Panorama Construction: An In-Depth Look into Image Stitching