Chris Birchall
Software Engineer at 47deg
England, United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarChris Birchall is a principal software engineer with 14 years' experience building robust back-end systems and developer tools, currently at 47 Degrees in the UK. He brings deep Scala expertise demonstrated by notable contributions to cornerstone projects like scala3, scalameta/scalameta, scalafmt and the Typelevel ecosystem (cats, cats-effect). Chris focuses on compiler and language tooling improvements, caching and performance-sensitive libraries, and has a strong testing and benchmarking mindset shown by extensive unit tests and benchmarks across projects. He’s comfortable working on both language internals (REPL, parsing and pretty-printing) and higher-level developer ergonomics (Metals code actions, import fixes). Known for principled engineering, he blends careful diagnostics and refactoring with pragmatic feature work—often addressing subtle parsing and API edge-cases other contributors overlook. Based in England, he pairs open-source craftsmanship with production experience at Guardian, OVOtech and M3Dev.
15 years of coding experience
Japanese
Stackoverflow
9,209reputation
565kreached
50answers
21questions
scala
top-5%
java
top-5%
Github Skills (53)
asynchronous10
unit-testing10
parserator10
monitoring10
code-formatting10
ls10
caching10
typesc10
parser10
typeclass10
redis10
async10
guava10
testing10
macros10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
cb372/scalacache
Feb 2013 - Jul 2020
Simple caching in Scala
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:537 commits, 219 PRs, 298 pushes in 7 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on implementing and testing backend functionality within the ScalaCache project. They added a Guava cache implementation, improving the cache key format and incorporating unit tests. The user also contributed to refactoring code for improved import handling and implemented several new cache backends, including Ehcache and Redis, adding comprehensive testing for their functionality.
cachingscala
typelevel/cats
Sep 2016 - Sep 2020
Lightweight, modular, and extensible library for functional programming.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 12 commits, 9 PRs in 4 years
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the `cats` library, focusing on functional programming concepts. They added a helper method to convert between Kleisli types and implemented a `toReader` implementation. Additionally, the user introduced a `defer` factory method to `ContT`, enhancing its functionality. They also added documentation and unit tests related to these additions and refactored the `ContT.defer` implementation.
functional-programming
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