Derek Prior
Senior Director Of Engineering at GitHub
Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Prior is a seasoned engineering leader with 16 years of experience building and scaling web platforms, currently serving as Senior Director of Engineering at GitHub in Somerville, MA. He combines hands-on backend expertise in Ruby on Rails with proven people leadership, having progressed through technical and management roles at GitHub and thoughtbot. Derek is an active open-source contributor to prominent projects like rails/rails and thoughtbot/clearance, where his work improved security, performance, and developer ergonomics. He has a strong track record modernizing dev and CI workflows (e.g., suspenders) and designing reliable database abstractions (scenic). Known for mentoring teams that shipped high-visibility features such as Suggested Changes and Free Private Repositories, he pairs product-minded execution with attention to maintainability. Outside of leadership, he brings practical security-minded refactors and test-performance tweaks that quietly improve developer velocity.
15 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors Computer Science, Bachelors Computer Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst
Stackoverflow
3,507reputation
194kreached
100answers
7questions
mysql
top-5%
string-length
top-5%
Github Skills (36)
ruby-rails10
postgresql10
actioncontroller10
testing10
rspec10
authentication10
user-authentication10
databases10
rails10
templater10
template-engine10
cicd10
ruby10
sql10
activerecord10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
scenic-views/scenic
Feb 2014 - Dec 2022
Versioned database views for Rails
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:5 releases, 16 reviews, 121 commits in 8 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of database views for a Rails application. Their commits show a focus on creating, updating, and dropping database views, as well as ensuring the correct behavior of these views within the application's schema. The user also refactored and improved the Scenic library, including adding more robust error handling and enhancing existing features. This involved modifications to the core library, which included improving the API's readability.
versionedrailssqlrubydatabase
thoughtbot/clearance
Mar 2013 - Nov 2017
Rails authentication with email & password.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:38 releases, 174 commits, 224 PRs in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily contributed to the `clearance` library, focusing on Rails authentication with email and password. Their work involved improving test performance by optimizing bcrypt cost factors and implementing proper HTTP status codes for denied API requests. The user also refactored the codebase by removing user-controlled parameters to mitigate security risks. Additionally, they made several changes to enable simpler implementation of the "remember me" functionality.
railsclearancerails-authenticationauthenticationemail
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