Chris West
Software Engineer at Tessl
Folkestone and Hythe District, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris West is a seasoned software engineer with 27 years of experience, currently building products at Tessl after a five-year tenure as Security Architect at Snyk. He blends backend engineering and security expertise, contributing to notable open-source projects like the Snyk CLI and the Rust web framework rouille to keep tooling robust and up-to-date. His background spans large media and enterprise environments (BBC, IBM) through to startup leadership (Logical Glue), giving him a strong track record of shipping reliable, maintainable systems. Chris is comfortable modernizing dependencies and refactoring critical code paths, a pragmatic approach that improves long-term project health. Based in the Folkestone and Hythe District, he pairs deep technical chops with practical security-first thinking, often working on behind-the-scenes infrastructure that boosts developer experience. A Warwick computer science graduate, he quietly focuses on maintainability and tooling improvements that pay dividends across teams.
27 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computer Science, BSc Computer Science at University of Warwick
Github Skills (18)
dependency-management10
snyk10
javascript10
vulnerability-management10
package-management10
http10
security10
web-framework10
nodejs10
rust10
server9
cli9
configuration-management8
analytics8
monitoring8
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
tomaka/rouille
Nov 2018 - Jul 2019
Web framework in Rust
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 2 PRs, 3 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on upgrading dependencies and refactoring code within the `rouille` web framework. Their commits show updates to the `multipart`, `url`, `rand`, and `base64` dependencies, indicating a focus on maintaining the project's underlying components. They also addressed deprecated features and made minor code adjustments, suggesting a commitment to code quality and project stability. These changes contribute to keeping the framework up-to-date and improving its overall functionality.
rustframeworkweb-frameworkserver
snyk/cli
May 2020 - Jun 2020
Snyk CLI scans and monitors your projects for security vulnerabilities.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:16 commits, 17 PRs, 16 pushes in 1 month
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the internal tooling of the Snyk CLI, focusing on package dependency and security vulnerability management. They made changes to update-notifier, configuration management, and analytics gathering, indicating a focus on maintaining the CLI's functionality and user experience. Their contributions also included refactoring to integrate with `snyk-module`, and improving the overall security and information of the tool. These changes suggest a blend of back-end development for tool features and security-focused integration.
monitorssarifmonitorsecurity-toolsvulnerabilities
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