Barney Gale
Principal Software Engineer at Foundry
Newport, Wales, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBarney Gale is a Principal Software Engineer with 14 years' experience at Foundry, where he has progressed from QA engineer to senior technical leadership roles driving test automation, DevOps, and platform reliability. A Linux and Python specialist, he modernised legacy testing infrastructure—introducing pip, virtualenv and pytest workflows—and published internal packages and pytest plugins to smooth cross-team adoption. He balances hands-on engineering (including C++/Lua documentation and embedded work) with people leadership, having hired and led QA teams and taken on Scrum Master-like duties when needed. An active contributor to CPython’s pathlib, he has influenced core filesystem semantics such as immutability and symlink handling—an uncommon backend impact for someone rooted in test engineering. Based in Newport, Wales, he blends customer-focused support and technical authorship with a curiosity for breaking and fixing systems.
15 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computer Science, BSc Computer Science at University of Southampton
Github Skills (7)
file-api10
filesystem10
python10
refactor9
refactoring9
version-control7
git7
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
python/cpython
May 2021 - Jan 2023
The Python programming language
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:640 reviews, 13 commits, 833 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Barney primarily contributed to the core logic and maintenance of the pathlib library. Their contributions involved making the `pathlib.Path` immutable by removing undocumented support for "closing" a path using context managers. They also moved method implementations into the path accessor and added a new "follow_symlinks" parameter to `pathlib.Path.stat()` and `chmod()`. Additionally, the user worked on fixing inconsistent joining in `WindowsPath(PosixPath(...))` and handling NTFS alternate data streams.
programming-languagepython
barneygale/httpio
Jun 2016 - May 2019
Python library for reading HTTP resources as random-access file-like objects using the `Range` header
Contributions:11 commits, 4 PRs, 9 pushes in 2 years 11 months
pythonrandom-access
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