My story
My name is Shawn Strucel. I am a driven web developer that loves to experiment with new technologies. I have played many roles in my career from full stack developer to technical lead to product owner. In my free time I’m often creating music or writing some code to make my life easier. While web development has been the majority of my career I am often busy with a variety of programming languages to enable efficient solutions for the situation. I enjoy making custom solutions for the day to day tasks that feel inefficient and love to see something that took hours manual take minutes.
Education
If you’ve seen my resume you’ve probably noticed I have a little bit of a non-standard degree for a Full Stack Developer: Mechatronics. The reason for this is that I have always been fascinated by all parts of engineering, from when I was making my own guitar effects pedals to when I was writing code for an Arduino to make a makeshift robot move around the room. To me, mechatronics seemed like a great fit to see all these systems work in tandem and create something each discipline could not achieve individually.
Interestingly, at McMaster university, their Mechatronics program is heavily weighted towards the software discipline. This makes sense as software tends to be the glue that holds together many complex systems in our modern world. This focus on software opened my eyes wider to the world of software development, so much so that I made it my career path. I have been doing full stack development for 7+ years and love working with software of all forms. Web development specifically is a lot of fun since you often can see results immediately and iterate on your work to make a robust and attractive solution.
Passions
If I had to boil down my passions to 2 key areas I would choose music and automation. Although an unlikely pairing, I often see many areas where they share many aspects.
My passion for music began when I picked up a guitar at 16, I love playing the guitar and producing different types of music on my home recording setup. It’s always exciting when I get to mix my love of music with software, like creating my own MIDI scripts or creating an Arduino synthesizer.
My passion for automation stems from a desire to avoid wasted work. Where others might spend hours plugging at a manual task you can count on me to find a solution to minimize labor while producing the same results. I find software development to be one of the best applications of this passion as there are so many scenarios where someone could spend hours doing something a simple program could complete in minutes. I remember in one of my previous student jobs I created a simple program that automated the whole position such that I had to get a whole new role since the work scheduled for 4 months was done in 1.