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I'm Denis. Wearer of many hats: web, full stack, frontend design, managing systems at scale.
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Portfolio

About

Based out of Toronto, ON. Did a degree in computer science at the University of Toronto and have been developing professionally since the fall of 2014.

This site was built to quickly demonstrate some of the Laravel-ness that consumed me between 2015-2018. It is also an example of a Docker application I have deployed on my Raspberry Pi 4!

Check out this site's source!
Copyright ©Denis Wong 2025

ClauseHound

My first gig out of school. ClauseHound was an online database of legal clauses to use for drafting contracts. At the time of joining, work was underway to incorporate an interface to drag clauses into pre-filled contract templates.

Back then, WordPress formed the underpinnings of the site, including the contract drafting app. I sincerely hope that has changed by now.

Highlights

  • Did the first iteration of incorporating a payment workflow for purchasing filled contracts
  • Further development of the JS-based contract drafting tool
  • Unrelated to the site, but: as a side project, took the payment workflow ideas and worked them into a simple service to request payment for legal services

+EXP Acquired Here

  • PHP (barebones code)
  • WordPress (ugh)
  • jQuery
  • Basic provisioning of instances on Azure
  • Stripe API
  • Bootstrap

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Strength.com

The worlds of e-commerce and sports nutition collide. Strength.com sold health supplements for athletes - think protein shakes, pre-workout mixes, fat-cutting pills, and swag for gym junkies and CrossFit faithful. The underpinnings of this site powered Strength.com and related sites, providing for a common foundation to power e-commerce sites.

Highlights

  • Did extensive frontend design across Strength and its related sites, by producing views (Laravel blades) and CSS derived from mockups
  • Wrote API integrations with different payment providers, including Stripe, Newegg, and Amazon Pay
  • Integrated with third party logistics providers
  • Did the initial implementation of acceptance testing for our codebase
  • Numerous bells and whistles in the application's backend: coupon functionality, UI for creating deal pages, delivering digital documents, speed optimization via lazy loading, adding store credits

+EXP Acquired Here

  • Laravel (and the concepts of MVC frameworks)
  • The Laravel ecosystem - Forge, Envoyer
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Writing web APIs
  • CSS knowledge, plus SASS3
  • Managing a LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP) stack
  • Less Sublime Text, more PhpStorm please

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BlockMaintain

Starting from 2017, there was a spike in the value of cryptocurrencies. This was our foot in the game. BlockMaintain managed large scale mining sites, and provided management and software support. Think of it as owning the full stack, but in mining terms.

Highlights

  • Built a responsive dashboard using Vue.js and WebSocket notifications for real-time updates, with history collection
  • Provisioned, managed and tuned the dashboard's Ubuntu instance to handle thousands of updates sent simultaneously every minute by miners
  • Built a customized network booting solution for the miners using IPXE and a Laravel application. Allows for defining custom configurations, seeing realtime data for booting machines, and queueing machines for bandwidth control
  • A bit of tinkering with a Dragino board to enable a custom temperature and humidity monitoring solution using up to six sensors
  • Managed the office's test lab, and the mining sites
  • Additional bells and whistles: development of the miner tools used on our customized Ubuntu image deployed on miners, optimizing GPUs for better hashrates, sending logs from miners to an ElasticSearch instance
  • ... and a couple weeks worth of setting up miners at two remote sites. Good times.

+EXP Acquired Here

  • Vue.js, WebSockets, Redis
  • IPXE
  • Various UNIX-y intricacies
  • A little bit of Golang
  • Tuning for heavy workloads

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Mercatus

Mercatus provides an inclusive solution powering e-commerce for second-tier American grocery chains. Second-tier chains are those geographically concentrated to one or a few American states, as opposed to national chains.
I took a break from full-stack development during my time here, focusing on development of the API that underpins the web and mobile frontend applications.

Highlights

  • Interacted with a multitude of APIs from many third providers, from payment to loyalty to in-house services
  • Led the charge to redo internal API endpoints to use the Doctrine ORM to speed up heavily-trafficked endpoints (though I still am very partial to ActiveRecord ORMs like Laravel's Eloquent
  • Participated in many cross-functional teams to get initiatives out to retailers
  • Mostly brownfield development. Parts of the code dated to at least a decade in some cases
  • In-person memories were fun while they lasted

+EXP Acquired Here

  • Opening JIRA-9000 tickets and working with the Atlassian stack
  • Monitoring via Splunk and NewRelic
  • Spinning up Docker applications
  • Brushing up on Postman skills
  • The transition from office-first to remote-first

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