Alex Barlow
Software Developer at The Mechanical Licensing Collective
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Barlow is a seasoned software developer with 16 years of experience building backend systems and leading engineering teams, currently contributing at The Mechanical Licensing Collective in London. His career includes progressive leadership roles at Kobalt Music, where he combined hands-on engineering with people management and technical strategy. Alex is an active open-source contributor—he built the core of a Go gRPC service framework with tracing, Prometheus metrics, CLI tooling and Docker generation—demonstrating a strong focus on observability, deployment automation and event-driven patterns. He thrives on turning distributed system concerns into pragmatic, production-ready solutions and brings practical experience shipping services that are easy to monitor and operate. Despite a nontraditional academic grade, his long track record of delivery and mentorship underscores deep applied expertise in backend architectures and developer tooling.
16 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BSc, Computer Science, 2.2, Bachelor of Science - BSc, Computer Science, 2.2 at The University of Manchester
Github Skills (18)
tracer10
microservices-application10
go10
prometheus10
microservices10
trace10
grpc10
application-framework9
dockers9
docker9
app-framework9
web-framework9
api8
apim8
api-design8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
lileio/lile
Jan 2017 - Mar 2021
Easily generate gRPC services in Go ⚡️
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 2 reviews, 134 commits in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Alex implemented the core structure of a gRPC server, including options for interceptors, tracing, and Prometheus metrics. They added OpenTracing support, including automatic header passing for tracing. They created a command-line interface (CLI) for service creation, including Dockerfile generation, demonstrating a focus on deployment. The user also worked on a pubsub package, indicating an interest in event-driven architecture.
golangprotobufgrpc-servicesgrpcframework
lileio/fromenv
May 2018 - Jun 2020
Contributions:1 PR, 8 pushes, 2 branches in 2 years 1 month
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