Ryan Macdonald
Chief Technology Officer at Obsidian Apps
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRyan Macdonald is a pragmatic technology leader and serial founder with 11 years building full-stack web products and commerce platforms from startup to scale. As CTO of Obsidian Apps and Uniting Gamers he designs and ships embedded Shopify apps and white‑label e-sports platforms, bridging Rails/GraphQL backends with React/React Native frontends. At Shopify he moved across the stack—improving API performance by 10x, leading real-time integrations with websockets, and contributing to theme tooling like the widely used Slate project. He combines hands‑on engineering (Go, Ruby, JavaScript) with product intuition, observability practices, and developer tooling that make teams more productive. Based in Toronto, he pairs entrepreneurial curiosity (former music-production founder) with a habit of refactoring brittle build systems into maintainable, Node-driven pipelines.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bilingual Diploma, Bilingual - High School, Bilingual Diploma, Bilingual - High School at Collège Notre DameDiploma, Music Industry Arts, 4.0 GPA, Diploma, Music Industry Arts, 4.0 GPA at Fanshawe College
English, French
Stackoverflow
116reputation
20kreached
3answers
1question
Github Skills (15)
theme-development10
gulp10
nodejs10
build-automation10
shopify10
javascript9
homebrew6
ionic-framework6
npm6
qmk6
macos6
qmk-firmware6
cordova-cli6
cordova6
angularjs6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
Shopify/slate
Jun 2016 - May 2017
Slate is a toolkit for developing Shopify themes. It's designed to assist your workflow and speed up the process of developing, testing, and deploying themes.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:132 commits, 2 PRs, 4 pushes in 10 months
Contributions summary:Ryan's commits primarily focused on refactoring and updating the build process of a Shopify theme toolkit. They replaced the SCSS linting process, migrating from a gem-based system to a Node.js-based solution, and updated related dependencies. Additionally, the user added new generator files to the project and updated the code for proper environment support across commands. Their work demonstrates a strong understanding of build tooling, theming frameworks, and Shopify's development environment.
shopifytestingthemesslate
macdonaldr93/yamm-nav-walker
Oct 2015 - Mar 2017
A custom WordPress nav walker class to implement the Yamm 3 bootstrap mega menu navigation style in a custom theme using the WordPress built in menu manager.
Contributions:2 releases, 6 commits, 4 PRs in 1 year 4 months
bootstrapmegamenuwordpress
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