Gordon Pedersen
Senior Software Engineer
- Melbourne, Australia
- [email protected]
- death.id.au
- github.com/deathau
- in/gordon-pedersen
- Download PDF
Available for work from August 2026
Senior software engineer with 15+ years building and shipping production systems — from co-founding a technology startup and leading its delivery for fifteen years, to modernising legacy eCommerce platforms and building the internal tooling teams run on. I'm at my best making sense of messy systems: untangling a platform nobody wants to touch, finding the cause of an outage nobody can reproduce, and writing it down so the next person doesn't start from zero. Creator of an award-winning open-source Obsidian plugin with 1.3M downloads.
Experience
SWiM Communications
Full-Stack Developer
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- Developer across a portfolio of CS-Cart eCommerce platforms and a 45-site WordPress estate — custom addon development, checkout and payment integration, database migration, performance and incident work, and direct client scoping. Day-to-day in PHP 8, MySQL/MariaDB, Smarty, JavaScript and SCSS, on DDEV/Docker and cPanel/WHM.
- Migrated a national online retailer from CS-Cart 4.5 / PHP 7.1 to 4.20 / PHP 8.3 — fifteen sequential major versions and two PHP runtimes — on a live store carrying 201,000 orders, 89,000 customers and a 3.2 GB database, closing a nine-year platform-security gap without data loss.
- Built that store's anti-fraud suite: PayPal Advanced Card Payments (Card Fields) with 3-D Secure and Apple/Google Pay capture, plus order IP geolocation flagging billing-country mismatches for staff review — built on the platform's bundled MaxMind database, adding no runtime dependency, no per-query cost and no data leaving the server.
- Rebuilt and launched the B2B checkout for a safety-equipment retailer running two storefronts from one backend — pay-now, quote-request and trading-account order paths, a weight-and-freight shipping engine, Stripe, and automatic surcharge logic. Used daily by trade customers and the client's internal sales team.
- Diagnosed and eliminated recurring production outages on a client store, root-causing a PHP-FPM pool configured to permit 160 GB of memory on a 64 GB host. Peak database load fell from 12 CPU cores to 0.14, and downtime stopped.
- Took time tracking into the agency's in-house CodeIgniter CRM from written pitch through spec, build, deploy and user documentation — replacing a manual copy-paste workflow for every developer in the company.
- Designed and built the agency's shared knowledge base as its engineering handover system — a git-backed markdown repository structured so that colleagues and their AI coding assistants read it directly, with secret scanning in both a pre-commit hook and CI and a PR-only workflow. Distilled a 300-file personal vault into 38 verified pages, plus shared CLI tooling for the team's routine server, DNS and deployment tasks.
Independent Developer
Open-Source & Game Development / Career Break
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- Maintained and grew my award-winning Obsidian plugin, Sliding Panes (Andy Matuschak Mode) — a novel way to view open panes in Obsidian. 879 GitHub stars, 1.3M downloads.
- Built and maintained a widely used browser extension, MarkDownload — clips web pages as Markdown for saving into Obsidian or as plain text. 4k GitHub stars, 30k+ downloads.
- Designed and shipped an original mobile game, Cube Tube, deepening my Ruby and game-development skills.
- Was primary carer during a planned family leave while staying active in open source and current with industry tooling.
Aerion Technologies
Co-founder · Senior Software Architect · Head of Front-End
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- Co-founded and scaled a technology startup over 15 years, owning software delivery from concept to deployment and maintenance. Peaked at a team of 15+, all remote, across dozens of projects and clients.
- Architected and led delivery of software across many industries: mobile apps for architectural inspections, SaaS platforms for retail digital and in-store marketing, and gamified educational tools for specialist learning centres.
- Built and led teams of 5–10 developers, setting technical direction and fostering a collaborative, high-performing culture.
- Partnered with clients from ideation through delivery — defining requirements, refining concepts, and validating solutions with stakeholders at every step.
- Helped establish Shopfront Solutions, a digital marketing platform used by 980+ pharmacies and other retailers across Australia.
Skills
- Languages
- JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Ruby, C#, Razor/Blazor, HTML, CSS (LESS/SASS), SQL, Objective-C
- Frameworks & Libraries
- React, Vue.js, Angular, Node.js, Bun, Express, .NET / ASP.NET Core, CodeIgniter, Smarty, jQuery, Handlebars/Nunjucks
- Platforms
- CS-Cart, WordPress (Bedrock/Sage), WooCommerce
- Data
- PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MS SQL, SQLite, Firebase
- Cloud & DevOps
- Azure, AWS, Cloudflare, Docker, DDEV, CI/CD, Git/GitHub, npm, cPanel/WHM
- Integrations
- Stripe, PayPal, GA4 / Google Tag Manager
- AI & Agentic Development
- Claude Code, context engineering, modular agent skills, machine-readable documentation systems, self-hosted Coder workspaces
- Practice
- System Architecture, API Design, Legacy Migration, Incident Response & Root-Cause Analysis, Developer Experience, AI-Assisted Development, Technical Documentation, UX/UI Design, Team Leadership, Agile/Scrum, Stakeholder Management
Selected Projects
A sample of shipped work — more at death.id.au/cv.
- Just Bricks — Migrated a live LEGO retailer across fifteen sequential CS-Cart major versions and two PHP runtimes, then built its anti-fraud suite: PayPal Card Fields with 3-D Secure, and order IP geolocation flagging billing-country mismatches. PHP · CS-Cart · MySQL · PayPal ACDC
- Area Safe Products — Rebuilt the B2B checkout for a safety-equipment retailer running two storefronts from one backend: pay-now, quote-request and trading-account paths, a weight-and-freight rate engine, and automatic heavy-item surcharges. PHP · CS-Cart · Smarty · Stripe
- Canvas Factory — GA4 / GTM ecommerce tracking for a wall-art store that sells sizes rather than products, using a composite item-ID scheme over an external image catalogue and repairing event integrity across an iframe boundary. JavaScript · GA4 · GTM · CS-Cart
- Shopfront Solutions — SaaS platform for digital and in-store retail marketing. C# · ASP.NET · JavaScript
- Robotic Mission to Mars — Interactive educational game that controls a real-life robot. C# · ASP.NET · Computer Vision
Education
Bachelor of Computer Science (Games Technology)
La Trobe University
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Awards & Recognition
- Plugin of the Year 2020 — awarded to Sliding Panes by the Obsidian community.
