David Barratt
Founding Engineer at Flex (YC S23)
Orlando, Florida, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Barratt is a founding engineer and product-minded technologist with 14 years of experience building scalable web applications and shaping technical strategy. Based in Orlando, he has led migrations, performance improvements, and developer experience initiatives at companies like Drizly and the Wikimedia Foundation, including impactful work that cut costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars and reduced key web metrics significantly. He blends backend systems expertise (notably contributing PHP core changes to MediaWiki) with modern frontend and platform migrations—driving TypeScript adoption, Next.js App Router transitions, and CI/CD modernization. A creator of consumer apps like Cinematix and Chickaree, David describes himself as an artist as much as an engineer, bringing design sensibility to technical solutions. He excels at untangling legacy architectures and delivering pragmatic roadmaps that align engineering with business goals. Currently a founding engineer at Flex (YC S23), he focuses on building web products with real-world impact.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Associate of Arts - AA General Studies, Associate of Arts - AA General Studies at State College of Florida-Manatee-SarasotaMaster of Business Administration - MBA, Master of Business Administration - MBA at University of Central Florida
Stackoverflow
556reputation
61kreached
4answers
17questions
Github Skills (16)
php10
mediawiki10
wikipedia10
apidoc9
user-authentication9
api9
architecture8
architectures8
http6
htaccess6
ssl6
jpeg6
javascript6
apache6
converter6
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
wikimedia/mediawiki
Aug 2017 - Oct 2020
🌻 The collaborative editing software that runs Wikipedia. Mirror from https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/core. See https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access for contributing.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:49 commits in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:David contributed to the core functionality of MediaWiki, focusing on namespace management, user permissions, and revision handling. The user added features like the ability for partially blocked users to tag and delete revisions. The commits also include refactoring and improvements to internal classes related to change tags and API interactions. The user's work primarily involved PHP code changes within the MediaWiki codebase.
collaborative-editingmediawikiphpwikiwikipedia
geosocio/web
Oct 2017 - Aug 2021
Contributions:22 pushes, 2 branches in 3 years 10 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.