Wilson Silva
Wilson Silva

About me

I love what I do and I love to do it well. Ideas are cheap and only as valuable as their execution. I enjoy shipping products and building things. I like people who focus on collaborating in a transparent way, which also sometimes means having the hard conversations to keep things healthy.

Rather than being spoon-fed tasks, I thrive in a collaborative environment where I can be entrepreneurial and accountable for my own work, setting a high technical standard across the development team by developing and refining best practices and standard processes, which simplify the management and reduce the cost of the infrastructure.

While I have my preferred stack, I’m always looking out for interesting new technology. I experiment with new programming languages on my time off, building something in Elixir, Solidity (Ethereum), Flutter (mobile apps) or seeking best-practices, principles and design patterns to help me architect clean, efficient and maintainable systems.

Work Experience

June 2022 - Present

Open source projects

Developed various open source projects, in multiple programming languages, such as Ruby, Go, Dart/Flutter and more.

  • Developed Feuk - “Duolingo for Thai” and pitched it to 3 Thai schools
  • Created https://nostr-ruby.com - an Asynchronous Nostr client in Ruby.
  • Created https://raylib-ruby.com - a gem to create highly performant, cross-platform, 2D and 3D applications, games, and visualisations.
  • Managed the internship of 2 students to deliver an e-commerce cross-platform app in Flutter
  • Currently working on https://caloriecount.ing

May 2019 - June 2022

Mindful Chef, UK | Lead Developer

Mindful Chef is a healthy recipe box delivery service in the UK. I was responsible for architecting, hiring, onboarding, mentoring and managing the development team of more than 20 developers. As the highest technical authority in the team, I was also responsible for specifying and implementing the technical strategy of the company. Scheduling meetings, gathering requirements, specifying Jira tickets, prioritization, setting development guidelines, CI pipelines, documentation strategy, security, communication workflows, incident management, scrum mastery and more.

Notable contributions:

  • Provided technical oversight and leadership across the business and acted as a functional manager
  • Assembled a team of highly skilled and motivated engineers that are proud of their work still remain in the company
  • Ensured the scale at a rapid pace by providing a vision for people, process and technology
  • Promoted a flat hierarchy where everyone is accountable and responsible from end to end
  • Lead the team on a journey of owning quality and and help them to continuously improve
  • Achieved 100% test coverage

May 2018 - February 2019

Adaptive Lab / Idean, UK | Technical Architect

Responsible for activities that ensure the quality, reliability, and stability of Superdrug Mobile (superdrugmobile.com) production systems and services that power the customer experience. These activities included the design and specification of technical changes that facilitated the integration of software development and delivery from inception to full operation.

Notable contributions:

  • Developed and maintained superdrugmobile.com
  • Setup coding standards and enforced them with automation
  • Setup logging and error reporting tools for the long term maintenance of the project
  • Met with the leads to discuss architectural changes
  • Met with the team regularly to discuss UX improvements, A/B experiments and goals

Jun 2017 - May 2018

Laverock Von Shoultz / FDJ Gaming Solutions UK, UK | Senior Full Stack Engineer

As a consultant of Poetic Justice, my services were requested to develop https://www.enligne.parionssport.fdj.fr/ a sports betting website for Française Des Jeux. The final solution is split into an Angular SPA, a Rails CMS, a RESTful API and a highly modular and configurable web framework composed of 57 internal gems, which was used to assemble other CMS and websites of the same nature such as https://www.winner.co.il/.

Notable contributions:

  • Defined the Application Architecture guidelines
  • Defined and implemented a strategy to eliminate huge amounts of technical debt
  • Introduced mandatory code reviews
  • Introduced mandatory tests for new code or modifications of existing code
  • Introduced coding guidelines and developed tools the to enforce them automatically
  • Configured the code repositories to only allow reviewed code to be merged
  • Transformed the CI into in multi-step, multi-branch, concurrent, isolated pipelines
  • Introduced additional CI build steps such as code linting, security audits and realtime build status notifications
  • Introduced code coverage measuring tools and increased the test coverage by more than 1000%
  • Proposed strategies to reduce the likelihood of introducing bugs and duplicating development efforts

  • Developed a highly modular and configurable web framework for use in the betting industry
  • Developed and Dockerized a CMS to manage https://www.enligne.parionssport.fdj.fr/
  • Developed and Dockerized a RESTful API to feed https://www.enligne.parionssport.fdj.fr/
  • Developed tools to automate the release and management of gems (apollo-releaser)
  • Fixed critical security vulnerabilities

  • Specified more than 200 feature requests and bug reports
  • Reduced the CI build times from 30 minutes to 2 minutes
  • Reduced 30 minutes of standups to 1 minute using an automated standup chatbot
  • Held meetings with the team and the CTO to improve the whole engineering process, from development to security, communication and deployment

  • Never missed a delivery deadline - quite the opposite, delivered everything earlier than expected
  • Always produced quality, tested software
  • Always highlighted a problem along with a solution (no meaningless complaints)

  • Created a Slack channel to communicate, in realtime, the release of internal gems and their changelog (57 gems)
  • Created a Slack channel for realtime code reviews notifications and CI build statuses
  • Created a Slack channel for automated standups

Feb 2017 - Jun 2017

Poetic Justice, World | Senior Full Stack Engineer

I spent 4 months setting up my business in Chiang Mai, surrounded by entrepreneurial Digital Nomads. Defining plans and strategies to help companies transition from piles of technical debt to greenfields.

Oct 2014 - Feb 2017

Quiqup, UK | Senior Full Stack Engineer

I joined the startup world motivated by the the opportunity to learn, be challenged and grow, as well as being part of a group of passionate individuals with one goal. It was an easy to be convinced: I saw their product, believed in their mission and liked their approach. Then I was instilled with the value of hard work, ownership, and self-sustainability. architecture, development, interviewing, meeting clients, and management all came to me and my little island of responsibility. This pushed me to be more versatile, reliable, and productive than in any other project I’d undertaken.

Notable contributions:

  • Contributed to the improvement of development workflows and software engineering processes
  • Contributed ideas and implementation options during the technical design phase
  • Listened to the needs of internal teams and built tools that bring harmony to complex operational workflows
  • Worked closely with the CTO to ensure the availability and integrity of the systems and data
  • Scaled the infrastructure by anticipating growth and plan to address changes ahead of need
  • Designed and implemented RESTful API’s
  • Created business support services and tools
  • Implemented financial fraud detection systems
  • Created invoicing and asset management applications
  • Assembled a competent team by interviewing and reviewing candidates tests
  • Built prototypes, offering guidance and making suggestions for innovations in an agile fashion

May 2010 - Sep 2014

Hexastep, Portugal | Full Stack Developer

When someone takes a job with a corporation, they are given time to train and acclimate to the company’s systems. But I hit the ground running due to my curiosity and ambition. I became the professional to consult in all technologies I was required to use. And I was required to use multiple technologies, given the wide range of domains and different customers. I developed a wide range of systems, from 3D editing tools, governmental portals, queue management, analytics solutions, I was given autonomy to make technical decisions regarding complex project architectures and mentor juniors developers.

Notable contributions:

  • Architectured a real-time golf course management system
  • Created a governmental enterprise portal with Liferay
  • Created an hardware accelerated 3D modeling and visualization application
  • Worked on various stand alone web applications in Symfony, Ruby on Rails, Node.js and Flex
  • Incorporated TDD into the organisation
  • Stablished best practices in code structure and tool chain within the company
  • Managed 3 internships and 1 project
  • Eentored junior developers
  • Designed and developed interactive web components
  • Modeled civil infrastructures in 3D using Blender