Meet Mitchell Hynes

Summary: Mitchell Hynes

Mitchell Hynes is a full-stack software developer based in St. John’s, Canada. He works at Spellbook, where he describes his work as “computing law.” His portfolio presents him as a practical builder who enjoys learning, solving problems, and experimenting across web apps, AI tooling, game development, Rust, WebAssembly, graphics, and developer education.

The site is a compact personal portfolio with sections for About, Projects, and Blog. It also links to his blog, Jester’s Privilege, and his code is published on GitHub under the ecumene namespace, including the portfolio repository and some project repositories.

What he works on

Mitchell’s projects show a mix of product-minded full-stack development and technically ambitious experiments:

• ReviewGPT — a GitHub review copilot built with React, Electron, Express, TypeScript, AWS, and GitHub Actions. Rather than generating noisy AI review comments, it aims to help humans write better PR feedback. The project involved building a desktop app, GitHub PAT authentication, S3-backed update infrastructure, app notarization, and release automation through GitHub Actions.

• Dutch Blitz JS — a real-time multiplayer browser version of Dutch Blitz using React, TypeScript, and Reflect.net. The writeup focuses on synchronizing fast, simultaneous card-game actions, handling server-authoritative state, conflict resolution, optimistic UI, and smooth animations.

• Faber.gg — an early AI-powered 3D-generation web app built in 2022. Users uploaded 2D images and received generated 3D assets. The interesting engineering work was in post-processing raw AI output into usable game-ready meshes, including running headless Blender inside AWS Lambda to decimate models and bake textures.

• Rust Sloth — a Rust command-line 3D software rasterizer that renders OBJ models as ASCII art in the terminal. It includes a real graphics pipeline, terminal-aware rendering, z-buffering, Unicode/ANSI output, performance optimization, and even JavaScript export. The project repository is linked as ecumene/rust-sloth.

• Colco-rs — a Rust/WebAssembly/WebGL molecular viewer from 2019. It parses and renders molecular data in the browser using Rust compiled to WASM, with WebGL bindings and a focus on keeping binary size manageable. The project repository is ecumene/colco-rs.

Writing and teaching

Mitchell also publishes technical writing. The internal blog includes a Full-Stack Development Course written as an open-source reference for his GetCoding students working through a Node.js module. It covers frontend/backend/database architecture, React, Node.js, Express, MySQL, sessions, authentication, authorization, MVC structure, password hashing with bcrypt, and deployment to Fly.io.

Overall impression

Mitchell’s portfolio highlights a developer who is comfortable moving across the full stack: frontend UI, backend APIs, desktop apps, cloud deployment, CI/CD, AI infrastructure, graphics programming, Rust, WASM, and educational content. His project writeups are candid and engineering-focused, often emphasizing the messy parts of building real products: synchronization, deployment, performance, binary size, serverless constraints, and making AI outputs actually useful.