David Read
Senior Python Developer at Government Digital Service
Oxford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarDavid Read is a Senior Python Developer based in Oxford with 15 years’ experience building and hardening backend systems, particularly around open data and CKAN-powered data portals. At the Government Digital Service and as a director at Hackney Workshop he specialises in data workflows, geospatial extensions, harvesting and robust error handling for production services. He contributes actively to core CKAN and its extensions—improving datapusher reliability, DCAT harvesting consistency, and spatial mapping—bringing a test-first mindset and pragmatic logging/authorization fixes. Colleagues rely on him for clear migrations, careful refactors, and practical automation that make large-scale public data platforms more reliable and auditable.
15 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
3,184reputation
142kreached
150answers
3questions
python
top-5%
Github Skills (33)
authorizations10
postgresql10
python10
testing10
authentication10
authenticate10
geospatial10
geojson10
datastore10
data-storage10
ckan10
sqlalchemy10
authorization10
http-request10
openlayers10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
ckan/ckanext-spatial
May 2012 - Nov 2019
Geospatial extension for CKAN
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 73 commits, 17 PRs in 7 years 7 months
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on enhancing the geospatial functionality of the CKAN extension. Their contributions included customizing the extent map for the Digital Government Unit (DGU), modifying the plugin, HTML, and JavaScript code related to the map display, and updating the README.rst with configuration options. Further commits addressed typo corrections and merging updates from the master branch.
ckangeospatialgis
ckan/ckanext-harvest
May 2012 - Mar 2020
Remote harvesting extension for CKAN
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:183 commits, 99 PRs, 108 pushes in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:David contributed to the remote harvesting extension, making changes to improve the layout of the source page and implementing features like withdrawn/active source status indicators. They modified authorization logic to allow members of a publisher group to make changes. Further work included adding the ability to get the harvest source for a given dataset and copious logging for monitoring harvest activities.
harvestingckan
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