Donal Mcbreen
Senior Programmer at 37signals
United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDonal Mcbreen is a Senior Programmer with 10+ years of professional experience building reliable web and backend systems, currently focused at 37signals in the UK. He has a strong Rails and backend pedigree, contributing notable ActiveRecord improvements to the flagship rails/rails project that enhance encryption and binary data handling. His background spans application architecture and devops practices—improving deployment tooling and zero-downtime releases for projects like basecamp/kamal and hardening build compatibility for low-level C tooling such as statsite. A first-class Computer Science graduate from Trinity College Dublin, he blends pragmatic engineering with careful performance and compatibility work. Colleagues will find him equally comfortable refactoring legacy systems and shipping incremental infrastructure improvements that reduce operational friction.
10 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (BA), Computer Science, 1st, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Computer Science, 1st at Trinity College, Dublin
Github Skills (22)
git10
docker10
statsd10
testing10
c1110
dockers10
cicd10
ruby10
c1710
performance-optimization10
activerecord10
encryption10
deployment-automation10
scripting9
configuration-management9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
basecamp/kamal
Mar 2023 - Mar 2025
Deploy web apps anywhere.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:31 releases, 90 reviews, 445 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Donal primarily focused on improving the deployment process and application infrastructure for the `kamal` project. They made changes to the build and deploy scripts, incorporating the use of Docker and git archives for more reliable builds. These changes streamlined the deployment process by pulling image tags, introducing host-specific environment variables, and added a more robust image pruning strategy. They also implemented zero downtime redeploys with cord files.
containerszero-downtimezerorailsdocker
rails/rails
Jul 2022 - Jul 2022
Ruby on Rails
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 reviews, 1 commit, 16 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Donal primarily contributed to the ActiveRecord component of Ruby on Rails. Their work focused on optimizing object allocations, enabling encryption without compression, and adding support for binary columns within the encryption framework. Further contributions included implementing a MessagePackMessageSerializer for handling binary data, and adding a `dirties` option to the `uncached` method. These changes enhance performance and extend the functionality of ActiveRecord's encryption capabilities.
ruby-on-railsrailsframeworkrubymvc
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