Alec Gibson
Full Stack Developer at Reedsy
England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlec Gibson is a full stack developer with 10 years of experience combining back-end systems and front-end polish, currently building products at Reedsy. He brings a rare blend of aerospace engineering rigor (MEng First Class from Cambridge and turbomachinery experience at Rolls‑Royce) and pragmatic software craftsmanship, having contributed to notable open-source projects such as the Quill editor and ShareDB real-time backend. Comfortable across languages and layers, Alec has improved type safety, fixed subtle real-time race conditions, and tuned editor clipboard and drag‑drop behavior—work that reflects attention to correctness and user-facing detail. A fast learner and collaborative team player, he also writes technical reports, mentors STEM outreach activities for schools, and has a creative side evidenced by multiple Edinburgh Fringe productions.
11 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering (MEng), Aerospace and Aerothermal Engineering, First Class, Master of Engineering (MEng), Aerospace and Aerothermal Engineering, First Class at University of Cambridge
German, Spanish
Stackoverflow
2,602reputation
240kreached
34answers
19questions
css
top-5%
angular
top-5%
Github Skills (42)
editors10
operational-transformation10
ruby-rails10
typesc10
javascript10
sharedb10
back-end-development10
quill10
typescript10
rails10
typescript-definitions10
type-definition10
editor10
ruby10
type-system10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
share/sharedb
Jul 2019 - Nov 2022
Realtime database backend based on Operational Transformation (OT)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:49 releases, 126 reviews, 182 commits in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Alec's contributions center around enhancing the ShareDB backend, a real-time database backend based on Operational Transformation (OT). They implemented features like sending op's `source` to the server for middleware access and added hooks for end-of-op lifecycle. Additionally, they refactored `ot.applyOps()` for efficiency and addressed several bugs, including ensuring historic snapshots can be fetched with legacy json0 paths and fixes for presence related race conditions. The user also focused on improving tests and general code quality.
backendoperational-transformationrealtime-database
DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped
Jan 2021 - Oct 2022
The repository for high quality TypeScript type definitions.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:30 reviews, 19 commits, 54 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Alec primarily contributed to the type definitions for the ShareDB library. Their work involved updating and improving the existing TypeScript definitions, including adding support for new features like submit source, various middleware hooks, and the `ping` and `pong` events. They also made adjustments to the type definitions of existing components such as `Query`, `Connection`, and `Agent` to enhance their functionality and ensure better type safety, while also making fixes to existing types.
typescriptdefinitiondtstypingstypescript-definitions
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.