Ciaran Mcnulty
Director at Crania Ltd
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCiaran Mcnulty is a London-based director and seasoned software engineer with 15 years of experience coaching, training and delivering PHP-centric projects across startups and enterprise teams. He runs Crania Ltd, providing consultancy and hands-on training in Agile, BDD, DDD and TDD, and previously led training programmes at Inviqa while managing development teams and project delivery at BEAM.TV. A long-term open-source contributor, Ciaran has improved prominent PHP BDD and testing tools—phpspec, Behat and Gherkin—focusing on stability, clearer error messaging and parser internationalisation. He blends people leadership with deep backend craftsmanship, often surfacing small language and test refinements that significantly improve maintainability and developer experience. Trained at the University of Cambridge, he combines academic rigour with practical coaching to uplift engineering practices across organisations.
15 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
MA Computer Science, MA Computer Science at University of CambridgeHagley RC High School
Stackoverflow
18,838reputation
2.4mreached
57answers
14questions
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Github Skills (40)
unit-testing10
test-driven-design10
behat10
phpspec10
rails-i18n10
messaging10
mockk10
image10
testing10
test-framework10
message-system10
gherkin10
message-handler10
php10
mocks10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
phpspec/phpspec
May 2013 - Dec 2022
SpecBDD Framework for PHP
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:91 releases, 32 reviews, 1258 commits in 9 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Ciaran's commits primarily focused on improving the error messages in the testing framework by refining the wording and correcting grammatical errors. They made specific code changes to the negative failure exception messages, specifically modifying messages related to method calls. The user also adjusted tests to reflect the language changes and fixed incorrect code snippets. This includes changes to the Exception messages and tests, which indicate a focus on maintaining and improving the quality of the test framework.
phpphp-frameworkrad
phpspec/prophecy
Jan 2015 - Dec 2022
Highly opinionated mocking framework for PHP 5.3+
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:18 releases, 7 reviews, 175 commits in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Ciaran primarily focused on improving the `phpspec/prophecy` mocking framework by adding functionality to record arguments passed to methods when exceptions occur, specifically for MethodNotFoundException. This involved modifying existing classes and writing new specifications to test the updated behavior. The user also addressed minor code style issues and performed refactoring to improve test clarity and maintainability.
php-5testingphpmockingphpunit
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