Hi, I’m Derek.
I’m a developer based in Ottawa, ON, working on storefront performance at Shopify. The most recent project I’m proud of is Kinsley. You can find the rest of my projects on Github.
Want to chat? Feel free to email me.
Posts
My Workflow with AI Agents (2025-12-05)
A workspace with simple tools that leverages multiple parallel AI agents.
A Comprehensive Introduction to Tree-sitter (2021-08-06)
Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library. It can build a concrete syntax tree for a source file and efficiently update the syntax tree as the source file is edited.
How Shopify Dynamically Routes Storefront Traffic (2021-04-09)
Fast continuous integration (CI) time and deployments are great ways to increase the velocity of getting changes into production. However, for time-critical use cases like ours removing the CI time and deployment altogether is even better.
I wrote 3 posts. All of my posts are also available as an RSS feed.
Talks
ruby-tree-sitter (2025-01-27)
In this talk I introduce Tree-sitter, give an overview of different parsing techniques and how they compare to the decisions made by Tree-sitter. Finally, I introduce the Ruby Tree-sitter gem, and show how to use it to load & interact with Tree-sitter parsers.
scaling-shopify (2025-11-15)
I give this talk every year to Carleton University Software Engineering students on scaling software systems using examples from Shopify’s history as it grew from 10’s of requests per second to multi-millions requests per seconds.
I presented 2 talks. All of my talks are also available as an RSS feed.
Bookshelf
Deep Work (2021-07-17)
Deep work is Valuable, Rare, & Meaningful. This is the premise of the first section of Deep Work by Cal Newport. The second section of the book is devoted to strategies to improving your abilities to perform deep work more frequently and for longer durations.
Atomic Habits (2022-04-25)
Design your environment to promote the habits you want. Add cues for habits you’re building, remove triggers for habits you’re breaking.
Clear Thinking (2024-02-14)
Master your defaults. The gap between stimulus and response is where clear thinking happens—or doesn’t.
I wrote notes for 3 books. All of my notes are also available as an RSS feed.
Ideas
Scripty – Share Scripts via GitHub Gists (2024-04-11)
A CLI for sharing single-file scripts between developers. Storage backed by GitHub Gists, with import/update/sync workflows for lightweight collaboration.
Serverless Flashcards on Cloudflare (2025-12-19)
A flashcard app on Cloudflare’s edge: Pages for the frontend, Functions for spaced repetition logic, D1 for progress, and plain-text cards in git.