Blake Mesdag
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBlake Mesdag is a seasoned software engineer with 14 years of experience building and scaling large, production-grade systems from Shopify’s core Rails stack to petabyte-scale Hadoop and Kubernetes deployments. He combines deep backend expertise in Ruby on Rails and Go with hands-on infrastructure work—migrating services to Kubernetes, authoring Terraform modules, and implementing OpenTelemetry for observability. A steady contributor to high-profile open-source projects like ActiveMerchant and Rails, he’s improved payment gateway integrations and optimized file-watching performance in the framework itself. Based in Ottawa, he enjoys learning new technologies by prototyping small deployments, which informs practical improvements to CI, testing, and deployment pipelines. Notably, he has experience designing Blue-Green Kubernetes rollouts and transparent OAuth2 proxies following BeyondCorp principles, blending security-aware engineering with large-scale operational know-how.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science at Carleton University
English
Stackoverflow
26reputation
161reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (11)
testing10
application-framework10
app-framework10
web-framework10
ruby-rails10
activemerchant10
payment-gateway10
rails10
performance-optimization10
ruby10
xml7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
rails/rails
Jan 2014 - Apr 2016
Ruby on Rails
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 4 PRs, 15 comments in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Blake primarily focused on optimizing the `ActiveSupport::FileUpdateChecker` class within the Ruby on Rails framework. Their contributions involve improving performance through memoization and using `Time#compare_without_coercion` for faster time comparisons. The user also addressed edge cases related to file modification times and included tests to ensure the robustness of the changes. Their work resulted in a more efficient and reliable file update checking mechanism.
ruby-on-railsrailsframeworkrubymvc
activemerchant/active_merchant
Oct 2012 - Mar 2013
Active Merchant is a simple payment abstraction library extracted from Shopify. The aim of the project is to feel natural to Ruby users and to abstract as many parts as possible away from the user to offer a consistent interface across all supported gateways.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Blake primarily contributed to the Active Merchant library by adding and modifying payment gateway integrations. They introduced functionality for the Optimal Payments gateway, including AVS and CVV result codes, and refactored the code to improve readability. Further work involved updating supported card types for gateways like Iridium and Beanstream, as well as adjustments to address handling, specifically for Sage Pay form integration. Additionally, the user updated tests and configurations for Redsys and Worldpay gateways.
ecommerceaimadyenpayment-processingpayment
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