Work History

Features Engineer
Marco Polo
August 2019 - Present

• As of writing, just getting started, so no accomplishments yet :-)

Senior Mobile Developer
MindSea Development Inc., Halifax, Nova Scotia
March 2015 - July 2019

• Led development on 8 iOS projects with various teams of 1-4 developers, resulting in 23 apps shipped to the App Store used by hundreds of thousands of people each month.
• Wrote apps in Swift and Objective-C, and a shared library that's a mix of both.
• Had an awesome time with an awesome team and left on happy terms. After four years, decided to switch things up.

Programmer
Trilogy Software Inc., Calgary, Alberta
November 2011 - October 2012

• Developed features for DoxCycle, a PDF-based tax document management application for Windows; and TaxCycle, a Canadian tax preparation suite for Windows.
• I moved to a new city in 2012. Trilogy offered to continue working remotely, which was very nice of them, but I decided to move on.

Programmer
Gruber Lab, Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, Lethbridge, Alberta
October 2010 - June 2011

• Assembled an apparatus using commodity parts to conduct dynamic clamp experiments in neurons.
• Since those neurons came from rats, I needed to be trained in handling rats.

Side Projects

HTMLReader
June 2013 - Present

• A WHATWG-compliant (i.e. "like a browser") HTML parser written in Objective-C. The code is freely available at https://github.com/nolanw/HTMLReader, and I understand it's used in many shipping apps.
• This was a really fun project. I was scraping some HTML for a hobby project, and every HTML parsing library I could find at the time couldn't quite parse everything like my browser did. As I went to add one more hack to the pile to get the existing libraries to work, I thought "how hard can it be?"
• I remember this being a shining example of successful test-driven development, which is much more fun when someone else has written the tests for you. I also got my name in the HTML spec, which is cool.

Education

Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours)
University of Waterloo
Fall 2006 - Spring 2010

Non-Technical Interests

• I play ultimate frisbee year-round. (And, at one time, I played competitively.)
• I love baking. Mostly cookies.
• Board games are fun! Mostly Euro-style board games, ideally fairly quick.