Claire Pollard
Senior Software Engineer at Reuters News Agency
Ely, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolClaire Pollard is a Senior Software Engineer with 13 years of backend and embedded systems experience, currently shaping automated testing and DevOps practices at Reuters. They combine strong academic grounding—a PhD in Computational Algebra—with practical expertise in C++, Python, C#, SQL and JavaScript to deliver robust, scalable features for media asset management. Claire has driven significant system upgrades (Solr), rebuilt API test suites (Python 2→3) to improve coverage, and implemented image analysis plugins using Google Vision. An active open-source contributor, they extended the popular gpiozero library to support niche hardware like the Pumpkin Pi and JamHat, showing a knack for bridging hardware and software. Beyond code, Claire brings product-minded technical marketing experience from ModMyPi and a history of algorithmic work in Fortran for CAD/CAM tools, reflecting rare breadth across domains. Based in Ely, they’re also engaged in community coaching and volunteer work, blending engineering leadership with hands-on mentorship.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computational Algebra, PhD, Computational Algebra at University of St AndrewsMSc, Pure Mathematics by research, MSc, Pure Mathematics by research at University of Kent
Github Skills (8)
gpio10
embedded10
iot10
raspberry-pi10
python10
pytest9
ed255199
testing9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
gpiozero/gpiozero
Oct 2018 - Jan 2019
A simple interface to GPIO devices with Raspberry Pi
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 4 PRs, 24 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Claire's contributions primarily focused on extending the `gpiozero` library to support the ModMyPi Pumpkin Pi board. This involved adding the PumpkinPi board to the library, defining its LED layout and control, and adding associated documentation. The user also implemented tests for the new board functionality. Furthermore, the user added support for the JamHat.
raspberry-pipythongpiophysical-computingraspberry
tuftii/Sense-Hat-Examples
Nov 2018 - May 2020
Contributions:8 commits, 6 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 6 months
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