Andrew Parker
Software Engineering Leadership Consultant at The Software Anthropologist
England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Parker is a seasoned software engineering leader and coach with 15 years of experience building resilient systems, leading open-source projects, and transforming teams into self-organising, high-performance units. He led server-side work on Puppet and contributed to key projects like Hiera and the Beaker testing harness, improving reliability, testing tooling, and failure diagnostics for widely used configuration-management tooling. As an engineering manager and consultant he specialises in blameless incident analysis, migration from VMs to Kubernetes, and coaching engineers into effective leaders while keeping turnover low through acquisition-driven change. He currently co-hosts a podcast on tech leadership and runs a consultancy that offers fractional and one-to-one mentoring, blending deep technical chops with people-centred facilitation. A pragmatic problem solver, he pairs hands-on backend and DevOps expertise with a focus on data quality, event-sourced architectures, and production observability.
16 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors, Computer Science, Math, German Linguistics, Bachelors, Computer Science, Math, German Linguistics at University of WashingtonDiploma in Wood Design, Furniture Making, Diploma in Wood Design, Furniture Making at Sam Beauford Woodworking InstituteMaster of Science with Honors, Software Engineering, Master of Science with Honors, Software Engineering at University of Augsburg
English, German
Github Skills (14)
ruby10
test-automation10
rspec10
puppeteer10
devops10
puppet10
cicd10
beaker10
yaml10
testing10
logging9
string-interpolation9
git9
fest4
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
puppetlabs/hiera
May 2012 - Sep 2014
Lightweight Pluggable Hierarchical Database
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & DevOps Engineer
Backend Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:47 commits in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily contributed to the project by improving the stability and reliability of the Hiera codebase. This included fixing issues related to data lookup, string interpolation, and logging, specifically focusing on scenarios where loggers were not suitable. The user also implemented a fallback logging mechanism and addressed issues related to variable interpolation and recursive lookups. Additionally, the user was involved in dependency management and build system configurations.
database
voxpupuli/beaker
Sep 2012 - Jul 2014
Puppet Acceptance Testing Harness
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:9 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily focused on improving the testing and operational aspects of the Puppet Acceptance Testing Harness. Their contributions involved modifying the build process and improving the tooling around the test environment. They implemented changes to handle errors during shutdown and improved the reliability of tests, ensuring that logs are dumped when errors occur and the configuration is correctly managed. The user also refined internal structures, such as the FakeHost class, making it more robust.
acceptance-testingpuppet
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