Chris Shaw
Lead Developer at Democracy Club
United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Shaw is a Lead Developer based in the UK with 11 years of experience building reliable back-end systems and data-focused tooling. He has progressed from hands-on development roles through senior positions to lead engineering at Democracy Club, bringing deep expertise in Python, web scraping (Scrapy), and data management integrations. Chris is an active open-source contributor to notable projects such as CKAN and frictionless-py, improving APIs, plugins, and data import/export flows that power public data portals. He has a track record of turning messy web and data sources into structured, production-ready datasets—evident in scraping work for major retailers and location datasets and in CKAN improvements used by government portals. Known for pragmatic refactoring, thorough documentation, and test-driven contributions, he blends product-minded engineering with civic-minded open data work.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Computer Science, BSc, Computer Science at Swansea University
Github Skills (25)
json-parser10
json10
pytest10
python10
back-end-development10
jsonp10
webscraping10
ckan10
scrapy10
api10
spider10
parsing10
html-parsing10
data-extraction10
scraper9
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
frictionlessdata/frictionless-py
Nov 2020 - Jan 2023
Data management framework for Python that provides functionality to describe, extract, validate, and transform tabular data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 16 commits, 6 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the CKAN plugin, implementing core functionality like reading and writing packages and resources. Their work involved significant interaction with the CKAN API, including implementing methods for data import and export. Furthermore, they added tests and made code improvements, ensuring the plugin's reliability and expanding its feature set. The user also fixed docstring errors and added CI marks for testing.
data-validationdata-analysispythondatadata-management
ckan/ckan
Mar 2020 - Jun 2021
CKAN is an open-source DMS (data management system) for powering data hubs and data portals. CKAN makes it easy to publish, share and use data. It powers catalog.data.gov, open.canada.ca/data, data.humdata.org among many other sites.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 47 commits, 22 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the back-end of the CKAN data management system. Their work included fixing issues related to the `user_list` action, updating documentation with correct Solr query parameters, and adding new features like the `user_patch` action to modify existing user data. The commits also involved refactoring code and improving the documentation related to plugins and API interactions. These changes focused on improving the system's functionality and usability for data management.
portalspythondatadata-catalogdbpedia
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