Brenda Wallace
Senior Software Engineer at OpenAustralia Foundation
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrenda Wallace is a senior software engineer and pragmatic technical leader with 19 years of experience turning tangled systems into clean, maintainable products. Based in Wellington, she blends full-stack web, backend (notably Ruby on Rails), mobile Android work, and production engineering at scale—from Weta Digital's render pipelines to animation and VFX SaaS platforms. She currently holds senior roles at Education Perfect and is acting CTO at the OpenAustralia Foundation, reflecting a mix of hands-on engineering and organisation-level tech stewardship. An active open-source contributor, Brenda has improved UI, testing, and code quality in projects like OpenFarm and openHAB and helped productionize APIs for Growstuff’s open-data platform. She repeatedly gravitates toward messy, cross-disciplinary problems—legislation-as-code, all-of-government labs, and distributed rendering—and prefers practical, test-backed refactors over flashy rewrites. Colloquially a “potato farmer” polyglot developer, she pairs curiosity with a long history of civic and nonprofit governance.
19 years of coding experience
31 years of employment as a software developer
Whakamaru SchoolDiploma Software Engineering (embedded), Diploma Software Engineering (embedded) at Central Institute of Technology, New Zealand
Stackoverflow
111reputation
4kreached
5answers
1question
Github Skills (32)
gradle10
ruby-rails10
javascript10
mobile-development10
back-end-development10
rails10
app-dev10
java10
ruby10
javas10
android10
backend10
gradlew10
ruby-on-rails10
api-design9
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
Growstuff/growstuff
Sep 2016 - Nov 2022
Open data project for small-scale food growers
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:12 releases, 182 reviews, 4233 commits in 6 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Brenda's commits indicate a focus on back-end development within a food-growing open data project. The primary contributions involve implementing features and fixing bugs related to the data model and API endpoints. The changes show proficiency in Ruby on Rails and interaction with database functionality.
gardeningpythonfoodscaleopen-data
openfarmcc/OpenFarm
Mar 2017 - Sep 2020
A free and open database for farming and gardening knowledge. You can grow anything!
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:34 reviews, 69 commits, 253 PRs in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Brenda primarily focused on improving the user interface and functionality of the openfarmcc/openfarm repository. Contributions included fixing layout and code formatting issues, updating crop-related features such as icon display and edit functionality, and adding tests. The user also addressed code quality by applying linting and formatting rules, as well as performing merges and refactoring.
gardeningknowledgerailsplantsdatabase
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