Dominic Cleal
Principal Software Engineer at FreeAgent
Bristol, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDominic Cleal is a Principal Software Engineer with 17 years’ experience building and operating backend services, primarily in Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and a strong grounding in system administration and DevOps. He currently leads development of accounting SaaS features at FreeAgent, improving invoicing, receipts and self-serve CMS tooling that speeds marketing-led launches. Dominic is a prolific open-source contributor and maintainer across well-known projects including Rails and Foreman, where his work ranges from ActiveRecord bug fixes to auditing, CI improvements and smart-proxy system enhancements. He brings measurable operational experience—migrating services to AWS (ECS/Fargate, Aurora, Terraform), improving deployment safety, and optimising storage to remove production bottlenecks. Known for pragmatic refactors that reduce dependencies and race conditions, he balances shipping customer-facing features with low-level infrastructure reliability.
17 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BEng (Hons 1st) Electronics and Computer Engineering, BEng (Hons 1st) Electronics and Computer Engineering at University of Surrey
Stackoverflow
3,205reputation
179kreached
86answers
0questions
Github Skills (65)
testing10
rspec10
ruby10
automation10
i18n-js10
activerecord10
puppet10
test-automation10
puppeteer10
maintenance10
configuration-management10
audit10
rails10
cicd10
ember-i18n10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
theforeman/theforeman.org
Apr 2013 - Apr 2017
The new and improved Foreman website.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:369 commits, 276 PRs, 351 pushes in 4 years
Contributions summary:Dominic's commits primarily focus on updating and managing the Foreman website's releases and documentation. They regularly update the website's version information to reflect the latest releases and release candidates, including changes in the release notes. Furthermore, the user is responsible for adding API documentation, copying manual content for new releases and updating contributor lists, indicating a strong focus on maintaining the project's documentation and release processes.
foremanimproved
theforeman/foreman
Jan 2016 - Jul 2017
an application that automates the lifecycle of servers
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:426 commits, 848 PRs, 511 pushes in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Dominic's contributions primarily focused on internationalization (i18n) tasks, involving the extraction of new strings, pulling translations from translation exchange platforms, and implementing language-specific configurations. They also made code modifications to update the projects dependencies like unpinning Patternfly-sass, pinning jwt for Ruby 1.9.3 compatibility, and other miscellaneous updates. Additionally, the user modified code related to updating, and creating features of a smart proxy.
automatesmaasinfrastructure-managementvirtualizationhybrid-cloud
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