Michael

Pelletier

Michael

Pelletier

HomSurfin was a real-estate startup. Founded out of Minneapolis and through the Beta startup accelerator, HomSurfin was aiming to bring more social and cutting-edge tools to the process of finding a home.

• Led development and feature planning of a prototype mobile application using Vue, Quasar, and Python.
• Assisted with branding and design work.
• Participated in business pitches and user interviews, and helped run an event around user research.
• Planned out post-funding hiring for an entire engineer team, in terms of roles needed, salaries, and so on. Also helped to codify broad company benefits.

Upstatement is a design and engineering studio that works with clients on everything from research and strategy, to branding, to complete transformations of their online presence.

• Acted as Technical Director on more than 25 projects, frequently juggling more than one project at a time.
• Worked across many different stacks including PHP, Node, Ruby on Rails, VueJS, React, TypeScript, WordPress, Craft CMS, and even used Google Docs as a CMS once. Wrote technical briefs and documentation, participated in client interviews, performed technical walkthroughs and client training sessions, and contributed to statements of work and creative briefs.
• Pioneered an engineering mentorship program and regularly held open office hours to support others.
• Gave company-wide presentations on VueJS and context switching, and led a standardization project on our SCSS usage.
• Streamlined new project creation and created a Starter Kit for Craft CMS that has saved hundreds of developer hours.
• Clients included Tito’s Vodka, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Trace, PBS Newshour, the American Thoracic Society, Covid Protocols, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Earth Alliance, The Miami Herald, Flagship Pioneering, and many others.

Traackr is an influencer marketing management platform that makes it easy for brands to discover, and connect & collaborate with influencers.

• Led a project based around discovering new influencers who are invested in your brand - which won a "Best Influencer Discovery" award in early 2019.
• Introduced ES2015 support, Jasmine front-end unit testing, and the VueJS Framework, and served as a resource for the team in these areas.
• Worked closely with our designer to build a team-wide style guide and enforce consistency in both the look and feel of different aspects of the application.
• Followed Scrum Process (Sprints, Sprint Planning / Review / Retro, Story Pointing). Worked with our Product Owner to prioritise User-Experience focused bugs, technical debt, and feature requests.

Society of Grownups was a financial education startup initiative backed by MassMutual - focusing not on generalities, but helping young adults apply lessons and behaviors to meet their specific goals.

• Helped grow the development team from 2 to more than 12 developers. Responsible for reviewing resumes, interviewing, and onboarding. Additionally, improved hiring processes, including writing a programming test.
• Led a 6 month project, supervising 7 other developers and tasked with a complete rewrite of the website, including an upgrade from Ember 1.5 to 2.4, and the addition of Ember-CLI and Ember-Data.
• Designed a collaborative office space for developers, designers, and QA to work more closely together.
• Mentored two junior developers by citing practical examples of best practices, pairing, offering encouragement, and enforcing diligent code reviews.
• Helped push forward an initiative based around employees volunteering in the community (“Grownups Give Back”).
• Implemented improvements to the Team Culture with the creation of a quarterly 2-day Hackathon, and a monthly game night.
• Introduced Scrum processes and attended Scrum Master training with the development team.