Chris Corbyn
Principal Software Engineer at Up
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Corbyn is a senior web developer with 17 years' experience building resilient, high-traffic systems and developer tools, currently shaping product and platform work at Up from Melbourne. He blends deep Ruby and Rails expertise with strong systems and devops experience—Docker, AWS, CI/CD and microservices—gained across roles at REA Group, Flippa and other startups. A pragmatic engineer and technical lead, he moves comfortably between hands-on coding, team-level technical decisions and maintaining production infrastructure. Chris is an active open-source contributor, notably improving test infrastructure for the widely used Swift Mailer project and enhancing a PHP REPL’s parsing and robustness. Equally at home with object-oriented and functional approaches, he prioritises quality, test-driven development and clean design patterns. Off-hours curiosity drives him toward language design ideas—he aspires to one day create a programming language that addresses shortcomings he’s seen across ecosystems.
17 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
3 A-Levels Natural Sciences, 3 A-Levels Natural Sciences at Prior Pursglove College11 GCSEs, 11 GCSEs at Laurence Jackson SchoolDHE Natural Sciences Natural Sciences, DHE Natural Sciences Natural Sciences at Durham University
Italian, English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
35,028reputation
1.9mreached
458answers
210questions
rubygems
top-5%
postgresql
top-5%
ruby
top-1%
psql
top-5%
rspec
top-5%
cocoa
top-5%
Github Skills (54)
cli10
unit-testing10
rep10
docker10
python10
testing10
command-line-interface10
smtps10
smtp10
containerization10
dockers10
ruby10
smtpd10
php10
repr10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
borisrepl/boris
Nov 2011 - Jan 2015
A tiny REPL for PHP
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:119 commits, 1 PR, 1 push in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Chris developed and refactored core features for a PHP-based REPL. Their work involved a 2-tier system with a worker process, input parsing, and statement evaluation. Contributions include shallow parsing of input, integration of readline history, and improvements to error handling and code formatting within the REPL environment. They also focused on improving the overall behavior and robustness of the tool.
php
swiftmailer/swiftmailer
Dec 2008 - Jun 2012
Comprehensive mailing tools for PHP
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA EngineerContributions:102 commits in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the testing infrastructure of the Swift Mailer project. Their work involved adding test cases and refactoring existing test code, with a focus on SMTP event support and other transport functionalities. The commits demonstrate a strong understanding of the project's architecture and a commitment to improving code quality and test coverage. Additionally, some commits involved adding and modifying doc comments within various classes.
phpmaileremailsemail
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