Alex Tomkins
Technical Director at The Developer Society
Metropolitan Borough of Solihull, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Tomkins is a Technical Director and founder of The Developer Society, bringing 14 years of software development and leadership experience to mission-driven digital work for charities and NGOs. He progressed from web developer to lead roles and now manages and mentors a team while acting as the company’s technical lead, combining people management with hands-on engineering. Deeply experienced in Python and Django—especially Wagtail—he contributes to prominent open-source projects, improving test coverage, fixing nuanced CMS bugs, and optimizing performance. He also has strong DevOps and infrastructure-as-code skills with Terraform and Ansible, ensuring reliable deployments and reproducible environments. Alex’s background includes leading development at Blanc Ltd and earlier web roles, giving him practical breadth across product and delivery. Outside work he’s a keen tenpin bowler, a hobby that underscores his competitive focus and steady nerves under pressure.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computing Science, BSc Computing Science at Aston University
Github Skills (15)
testing10
deserialization10
cms10
debug10
serializable10
wagtail10
serializer10
pytest10
python10
memcached10
django10
serialization10
integration-testing9
refactoring9
unit-testing9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
wagtail/wagtail
Apr 2019 - Jan 2023
A Django content management system focused on flexibility and user experience
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 11 commits, 14 PRs in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the backend of the Wagtail CMS, focusing on improving test coverage, fixing bugs related to edit handlers and previews, and refactoring code. They addressed issues by modifying test decorators, improving the representation of edit handlers, and correcting document chooser block extraction. Additionally, they optimized performance in report views and corrected session key generation for previews.
cmsmanagement-systempythondjangouser-experience
pinterest/pymemcache
Nov 2016 - Nov 2016
A comprehensive, fast, pure-Python memcached client.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:11 commits, 1 PR, 3 comments in 10 days
Contributions summary:Alex focused on improving the test suite for the `pymemcache` client. Their contributions primarily involved adding and refining integration and unit tests to ensure the correct serialization and deserialization of various data types, including bytes, unicode strings, integers, and pickled objects. They addressed type-related issues and implemented tests to verify the correct behavior of the client with different data inputs and flags. Furthermore, the user added tests using different character sets.
memcached-clientpythonmemcacheasynciopython-memcached
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