Chris Withers
Senior Software Engineer at Fuse Energy
Reading, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Withers is a senior software engineer with 24 years' experience building robust, scalable systems and a knack for turning messy data domains into reliable infrastructure. Based in Reading, he combines deep backend and database expertise—demonstrated by contributions to core Python projects like CPython, SQLAlchemy and psycopg2—with real-world trading and HPC experience from long tenures at Jump Trading. He frequently publishes open-source fixes and enhancements (xlwt, xlrd, colander, deform, hovercraft), focusing on correctness, documentation and interoperability rather than flash. Chris enjoys digging into edge cases and will “bash” at a problem until he truly understands it, which has produced ambitiously over-engineered personal projects around UK rail data, home energy and finance. He mentors interns and grads, drives observability and meta-scheduling work, and recently pivoted to retail energy systems at Fuse Energy, applying the same curiosity-driven engineering to a new domain. Quietly practical and detail-obsessed, he often contributes small but high-leverage fixes that improve long-lived tooling used by many developers.
24 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computer Science with Image and Multimedia Systems, BSc Computer Science with Image and Multimedia Systems at University of Southampton
Github Skills (33)
debug10
object-mapping10
postgresql10
python10
validations10
package-management10
sphinx10
testing10
databases10
data-serialization10
validation10
forms10
serialization10
deserialization10
mocks10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
python-excel/xlwt
Mar 2012 - Jan 2018
Library to create spreadsheet files compatible with MS Excel 97/2000/XP/2003 XLS files, on any platform.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:88 commits, 41 PRs, 52 pushes in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to bug fixes, code cleanup, and enhancements related to the xlwt library, which is used to create Excel files. Their work included addressing licensing issues, fixing regressions related to generating sheets with frozen panes, and removing unused imports to clarify code. The user also made improvements to the documentation and packaging of the library.
xlsxcsvxlsopenxmlms-excel
python-excel/xlrd
Apr 2012 - Dec 2020
Please use openpyxl where you can...
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1 review, 203 commits, 89 PRs in 8 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on modifying the `setup.py` file, which indicates involvement in the project's build process and Python package management. They made changes to the `xlrd/__init__.py` and `xlrd/book.py` files, including adjusting import statements and modifying code related to version control and handling of external resources. Additionally, the user was responsible for fixing a bug related to the retrieval of the Book import.
pythonopenpyxlpython3python2excel
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