Michael Elfassy
In House Counsel at Assistenza International
Greater Montreal Metropolitan Area Canada
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Elfassy is an in-house counsel and corporate lawyer with 14 years of experience combining legal expertise and business acumen across Montreal’s corporate and international sectors. He holds a JD and LL.L (cum laude) and an MBA from the University of Ottawa, and began his career with a scientific B.Sc. in Anatomy and Cell Biology from McGill, giving him a rare multidisciplinary perspective on complex regulatory and commercial issues. Michael has acted as counsel for businesses and managed corporate matters in law firms and in-house at Assistenza International while also running a corporate practice as ME Avocat Inc., demonstrating comfort with both advisory and operational roles. Unusually for a lawyer, he has made technical contributions to open-source payment tooling—improving gateway integrations and currency handling in well-known Active Merchant libraries—highlighting a practical fluency with payments technology and software stability. He is based in the Greater Montreal area and brings a pragmatic, detail-oriented approach to navigating legal, commercial, and technical intersections.
14 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Licentiate in Law (LL.L), Cum Laude, Licentiate in Law (LL.L), Cum Laude at University of OttawaBachelor of Science, Major in Anatomy and Cell Biology (B.Sc), Bachelor of Science, Major in Anatomy and Cell Biology (B.Sc) at McGill University
English, French
Stackoverflow
11,533reputation
2.7mreached
96answers
58questions
css
top-5%
ruby
top-5%
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
jquery
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
jquery-selectors
top-5%
Github Skills (27)
convert10
cybersource10
payment-integration10
payment-gateway10
ruby10
currency-exchange10
currency-converter10
convertion10
javascript9
jquery9
css9
bigdecimal9
braintree9
ruby-on-rails9
jquery-selectors9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
activemerchant/offsite_payments
Feb 2017 - Mar 2020
A simple and unified API to handle dozens of different offsite payment pages.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 18 commits, 18 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the core logic of the `offsite_payments` library. They fixed rounding errors in currency amount formatting, released new versions of the software, and refactored code to use `Money.from_amount`. Their work touched multiple payment integrations, including Realex, ePay, and others, showing a deep understanding of the system's architecture. They also removed test issuers, which likely involved changes in how payment gateway configurations are handled.
apipaymentspayment-gatewayadyenpayment-processing
activemerchant/active_merchant
May 2017 - May 2020
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:6 releases, 13 commits, 15 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on enhancing the CyberSource payment gateway integration within the Active Merchant library. Their contributions included handling nested authorization replies, addressing specific reason codes, and improving the parsing of responses. They also reverted a previous change, indicating a focus on maintaining the stability and correctness of the CyberSource integration. In addition, the user updated the Braintree integration to reflect test mode correctly.
ecommerceaimadyenpayment-processingpayment
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