Derek Ekins
Head Of Engineering at Nurole
Stroud, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
SeniorDerek Ekins is a seasoned Head of Engineering with over 21 years in software development and 14 years of professional experience across web, backend and cloud platforms. He blends hands-on expertise in Node.js, Ruby and C# with a track record of modernising legacy systems—leading rewrites, migrations to cloud-hosted Rails/Heroku stacks, and high-performance backend optimisations for major brands. Comfortable in remote-first teams, he pairs strong problem-solving and communication skills with a pragmatic ownership mindset that treats mistakes as learning opportunities. His open-source contributions include practical front-end improvements to a well-used autocomplete component, showing attention to cross-browser UX and graceful degradation (including IE11 fixes). Based in Stroud, UK, he thrives at the intersection of delivery, maintainability and scalable architecture, often surfacing incremental changes that yield outsized operational gains.
14 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
11,295reputation
763kreached
98answers
49questions
angularjs
top-1%
ruby
top-5%
capybara
top-1%
automated-tests
top-1%
imagemagick
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
Github Skills (20)
javascript10
event-handling10
ui-components10
capybara10
angularjs10
automated-tests10
image9
json9
compatible9
browser-support9
ruby9
imagemagick9
html8
css8
accessibility7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
bevacqua/horsey
Nov 2015 - Dec 2015
:horse: Progressive and customizable autocomplete component
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 2 PRs, 2 comments in 6 days
Contributions summary:Derek primarily focused on improving the functionality and usability of the autocomplete component. Their contributions included refactoring event handling from `keypress` to `keyup` and then to `input` for better browser compatibility. They also addressed issues related to focus and blur behavior, ensuring the component's interaction was intuitive and resolved IE 11 compatibility issues. The user made improvements to the event handling logic and adapted the code to ensure correct behavior of the autocomplete features.
horseautocomplete-componentprogressivecustomizableautocomplete
featurist/vinehill
Nov 2016 - May 2017
In process bridge between http requests and connect based servers
Contributions:65 commits, 7 PRs, 47 pushes in 6 months
http-requestsbridgein-processserverhttp-server
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