Patrick MacDonald
Building fast, reliable web apps with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind — based in Calgary, Alberta.
Just graduated from Bow Valley College for software development, and I'm passionate in both the cliché and the literal sense. I have a love for making websites — it seems like the greatest equalizer. As a solo dev with a single user, I have access to the same hardware as billion-dollar companies through services like Vercel and AWS. A site I build can scale up and handle as many users as Netflix, with the reliability to match.
I've leveraged a great online community of "pay as you grow" and "pay as you use" providers to gain skill and experience working with services such as Clerk, WorkOS, Kinde, Novu, Google Cloud, Neon, and Vercel Blob, to name a few. These skills let me set up and configure new services into projects with comfort.
My framework of choice is Next.js, and of course I use Tailwind. What excites me about Next.js is its blend of server and client components, with the added layer of static and dynamic content. Its rendering strategy and cached components are really interesting to me — especially the tactics you can use to keep a component static. I'm also very interested in what Svelte is doing with the way it fetches data on the client or server, giving components direct access to the values instead of prop drilling. Although most of my projects are with Next.js, I'm very open to learning and playing around with other frameworks and languages. Speaking of which — TypeScript or JavaScript? TS all day; the type gymnastics save you tenfold in the long run. Anyway, if you've got this far, thank you.
Projects
A selection of projects I've designed, built, and shipped.
Landscape Friend
A SaaS platform for landscapers and lawn care businesses to manage services, send emails, and invoices.
Receipt Scanner Pro
Turn a shoebox of receipts into a searchable, categorized record — photo, totals, and category saved in one pass.
Clock Out
A time tracking app with secure authentication, organization management, and visual analytics.
Stocks
The ultimate market simulator. Real-time data, professional tools, and $10k to test your edge.
PolyMuse Wordpress WooCommerce Plugin
A custom plugin for Polymuse, enabling 3D model display and AR views on mobile devices.
Pat's Pre-Trips
A pre-trip inspection app with authentication, current and past trips, and defect listing.
Next-Todo
A full-stack Todo app with OAuth authentication, TanStack Query, and Neon PostgreSQL database.
HID Attack Research Server
A research server for studying HID and keystroke-injection (BadUSB) attacks. Built with Express, it hosts and delivers scripts to HID devices so the techniques behind these attacks can be understood — and defended against.
